0:00:00This is a whole new you quite literally is the first time this version of you has
0:00:03ever been captured before.
0:00:05So so laying the stage, this is me and my good friend, Adam.
0:00:10We are FaceTiming each other.
0:00:13Both with vision pro on, and I'm looking at his persona.
0:00:18He's looking at my persona.
0:00:20We're also recording our audio separately for the audio version of the podcast.
0:00:25And we are here while using vision pro to talk about vision pro.
0:00:30That's right.
0:00:31It's a, it's a mind bender of, of like of a type that I've never, ever experienced before.
0:00:38We're capturing ourselves in like eight different ways and also simultaneously viewing ourselves and listening to ourselves in eight different ways.
0:00:47And we've had to figure out how they all connect to each other and what it's all going to turn into for the listener.
0:00:55And that is the most mind bending exercise in cognition that I worry I'm not able to compute.
0:01:02I'm simply not able to wrap my head around this.
0:01:05Let me also put up front too, that if all goes well, knock on wood, we're going to have a YouTube version of this, which is our personas looking at each other talking.
0:01:15And so you might want to, if you're in your podcast player, just listening to the audio, if you're thinking, huh, maybe I'd rather do the YouTube version.
0:01:22Maybe you want to switch over now and see if you like it.
0:01:24Yeah.
0:01:25What was your buying experience like?
0:01:27I simply ordered it because I know enough now that I don't have to wait in line for the thing.
0:01:33I don't have to be there for the retail experience for the thing to exact.
0:01:36You know, that was the first few years of iPhone.
0:01:38Definitely spent the night, you know, in front of the Apple store when iPhone one came out, but I, I really just enjoy the convenience of it being shipped.
0:01:46Now it was getting later in the afternoon on ship day and my, my few friends who had ordered it, theirs had arrived already and I was getting impatient.
0:01:55So I got in the car and I ran to the, where the UPS truck was in my neighborhood.
0:01:59I've learned the trick with UPS drivers is, Hey, can I save you a trip?
0:02:04That's what you always say, which is a very, my dad thing to say, can I save you a trip?
0:02:08And then you're on their side, right there.
0:02:10You're not trying to be greedy, have the thing before it's ready.
0:02:13I can't remember the details of it.
0:02:16I do remember there was one time in the early years, I don't know if it was an iPhone or what, where I.
0:02:22Chased the FedEx guy down the street somehow.
0:02:26And he knew me when they know you they'll, they'll just hand it over.
0:02:29Sure.
0:02:30My buying experience is obviously always different than everybody's because I don't necessarily need to buy it because I've had the review unit since beforehand, but I did buy one.
0:02:39And I thought when I placed the order, well, since I'll already have one.
0:02:45I didn't have the review unit yet, but I knew I would.
0:02:48I thought, well, maybe I'll do in store pickup to see what that's like.
0:02:53Because I feel like with this product, it's different and I don't need to do that with a iPhone or certainly not a Mac.
0:03:00But I thought with this, maybe I will.
0:03:02And I got a Saturday evening pickup.
0:03:06So the second day and the weirdest part about it was that I got a different light seal size in person at the store than I did when I measured myself.
0:03:18And when I was out in Cupertino before getting my review unit with Apple, you know, we did the face measuring thing and for privacy sake there, you know, I've done this.
0:03:28I've had like five demos of this thing since June.
0:03:32And every single time I would do the face scan over a because I guess the software was evolving and they wanted me to use the latest version of the measure your head with the phone thing.
0:03:41And then B for privacy reasons, even if I said, just go ahead and keep my eyesight prescription and keep my face size, they wouldn't keep it for privacy.
0:03:51But like two weeks ago before I got the review unit, I was out in Cupertino for the final briefings before this thing came out and did the face scan again.
0:04:02And then a couple days later, did the face scan at home when I did my own preorder.
0:04:09And so both in Cupertino for my review unit and at home when I scanned it myself for the one I bought both times it came up as a 25W.
0:04:21You know how these things there's I think they go from 18 to 33 for sizes and they're all either N or W.
0:04:30And N either stands for normal or narrow.
0:04:32It doesn't really make a difference.
0:04:35And W is wide.
0:04:36So it was an exact match.
0:04:38It wasn't like, oh, in Cupertino I got a 24 and then at home I got a 25 or something like that.
0:04:43They were both 25W's.
0:04:44But then on Saturday night when I went to pick up the one I ordered at the Apple store, they were very nice.
0:04:52The store wasn't crowded, but it was 6.30 on a Saturday.
0:04:56They did kind of know who I was a couple or one of the guy who kind of gave me the guided tour had no idea, which is kind of the way I wanted it.
0:05:04But there were people there who knew exactly who I was.
0:05:07But I said, ah, sure, I'll take the guided tour.
0:05:09Let me I want to see what regular customers get.
0:05:12And I'm really glad I did.
0:05:13But that started with me doing the light seal face scan again.
0:05:17And this time it came up with a 33W, which doesn't sound close to 25 at all.
0:05:24Sounds quite different.
0:05:26And then we got to the end of it and Amy came over.
0:05:31Then she was on the phone call when I first came.
0:05:33She was like 10 minutes behind me, but she wanted to see me go through all of this.
0:05:37So it was like a nice little party there with like a guy, a couple of guys from the Apple store, me and Amy.
0:05:42But then after my guided tour, it seemed like a real dilemma and it seemed like it was an unusual situation.
0:05:50It seemed like most customers who had pre ordered if they got size 25W then in the store, they got it again, just like I did in Cupertino and at home.
0:05:59And they said, well, let's do it again.
0:06:02Maybe that 33 was weird.
0:06:04So we did it again.
0:06:0533W did it again with a different phone that the Apple store had 33W.
0:06:11So three times in a row on Saturday night, I measured as a 33W.
0:06:16But two weeks earlier at home and in Cupertino, I got a 25W and this totally triggers my sort of OCD that I have the exact right size.
0:06:27And if it had been coming up 25 and 26 or 25 and 27, I would think, who cares?
0:06:35Maybe my face gets puffier at the end of the day.
0:06:37I don't know.
0:06:37You're retaining water weight.
0:06:39Right.
0:06:40And they said, well, what do you want to do?
0:06:41And I said, I don't know.
0:06:42I said, I guess and again, it was helpful that, you know, it was all out in the open who I was and what I do.
0:06:48I said, well, because I have the 25W from the review unit at home, why don't I just swap it out, do the swap out here and I'll take the 33 that I'm measuring with here.
0:06:58And so now I have two vision pros, my review unit and my the one I own and I have two different size light shields, 25W and 33W.
0:07:09And which one feels better?
0:07:12This is the worst part, Adam.
0:07:14I don't know, but they definitely feel different.
0:07:17Do they feel different?
0:07:19How do they feel different?
0:07:20They're not like different shoes.
0:07:22It's not like one fits and one is over large.
0:07:25It's just they're different.
0:07:27Nope.
0:07:28And there's no practical, neither one of them has any more light leak than the other.
0:07:34Where it feels most different is the one that's the 33.
0:07:40And again, if I look at them side by side as closely as I can, just take both of them off and just look at the light seals on their own.
0:07:48And they're, you know, for those of you who don't have one yet, they're super easy to attach and detach.
0:07:53In fact, they're so easy to attach and detach that it's like the number one thing you have to learn is not to pick up the whole device by the light seal because it just magnetically pops right off.
0:08:01If I look at the two light seals on their own side by side, I with my eyes, I can't see what the difference is.
0:08:07It doesn't look like one if I stack them on a table, it's like, oh, this one's a half a centimeter taller or something like that.
0:08:15No, I don't even see it.
0:08:16But when I put it on, it feels ever so slightly wider at the sides of my eyes.
0:08:25So in other words, exactly at the spot on my face where now that I'm getting older, I'm developing crows feet, right?
0:08:31That sort of outer edge of the oval of your eyes.
0:08:36The 33 just feels like a wider set of goggles, even though when I look at them side by side, I can't see that it's wider and it just feels a little wider.
0:08:45And it I'm not used to it because I spent so much time during my review process with that 25.
0:08:52This feels a little weird to me because I kind of got used to the other one.
0:08:57Yeah.
0:08:57Well, wider seems like what you would want because it's just it's giving you a wider birth.
0:09:03The one thing I know from early use is you don't want to scrunch your face because that actually has an impact on your facial expression in your in your digital persona.
0:09:12The first time I put mine on and got on a face call, I realized that it was like sitting weird against my forehead.
0:09:17And I looked angry.
0:09:18I looked at angry at the people I was talking to.
0:09:22So I don't know.
0:09:23I just think you want more comfort in that realm, like a little bit of a looser fit, you know, a dad gene of a
0:09:28Yeah, I think so.
0:09:30So I that's and so if you told me right now you have to pack up your vision pro and leave your house for a month and you can only take one of them with you.
0:09:39I think I would take the 33 the bigger one, which I think is bigger.
0:09:43I don't even know.
0:09:44I just assume a bigger number is bigger.
0:09:47Maybe.
0:09:47Maybe it's European sizing and smaller is bigger.
0:09:50And I've seen some people speculate that these sizes aren't really is that the N and W are more size, you know, now or wide and that the numbers relate more to curvature types and that some are for flatter faces and some are for rounder faces.
0:10:07And it's not necessarily a size per se, but this maybe feels Yeah, maybe it's just a vibe.
0:10:12Maybe it's not physically related at all.
0:10:15You're just getting an apple sort of an assessment of the vibe.
0:10:19And I'm very trusting when it comes to that stuff.
0:10:21I it's kind of like the Sphinx knows all you know, like Apple.
0:10:26Tim knows, you know what my sizing needs are.
0:10:29So I'm just going to go with it.
0:10:30And I know that my experience might be like two degrees different with the light seal that Tim chose for me.
0:10:36But I'm okay with that.
0:10:38I want that.
0:10:39I want my experience to be defined by that that instinct of my vibe.
0:10:42Yeah, I would feel so much less.
0:10:46Like I said, triggered if it was debating between 25 and 27 instead of 25 and 33.
0:10:52But I think I'm just going to go with the 33 and it just it feels like it disappears on my face more than the other one, which I think can only be a good thing.
0:11:01Yeah, absolutely.
0:11:02It's because this is at the end of the day, this is hardware that you don't want to feel.
0:11:06You don't even want to know that it's on your face.
0:11:09That's part of this conversation is we have to sort of like define what this thing is and what it isn't.
0:11:15Especially like sort of in context of all of the other stuff that Apple makes.
0:11:19I think that's a really important part of the conversation.
0:11:22But I mean, you know, like having used it for a week now, that's my single greatest takeaway is that when you've been using it all day or for hours or whatever it is, it's supposed to disappear.
0:11:37You're not supposed to think about the fact that you even have this thing on.
0:11:40And it should be so stark that when you get up to pee and you go and pass by yourself in the mirror, you're like, oh, oh, that's right.
0:11:48I have a computer strapped to my face and I had almost entirely forgotten about it.
0:11:52And you're supposed to forget about it in the way that you are never going to forget that you're using a laptop or an iPhone.
0:11:59Right.
0:12:01Yeah. And it's so hard to explain that because it's both simultaneously true for me and not true that I never quite forget that I've got a very face heavy thing on my head.
0:12:14I know exactly what you mean.
0:12:16When it's doing the job of immersing you in the digital experience in front of you, then you've kind of forgotten about it.
0:12:23But that's kind of a rare thing to happen because for the most part, you are being reminded of the physicality of the thing, whether it's tethered to your pocket or whether somebody walks into the room and they're like, ha ha idiot.
0:12:36And you're like, oh yeah, oh yeah, that's right.
0:12:39Every time Amy comes in, she'll say something like that.
0:12:43And, but I do, I forget that I'm there.
0:12:45So I, I don't know if I should have saved this for the end or just get it out of the way at the beginning, but I feel like I want to get it out of the way.
0:12:53While it's in my mind, because I feel like it's what we're talking about.
0:12:57And I find myself losing time in this device in a way that I haven't lost time with a device in decades.
0:13:08I think I had the same sort of experience with the iPhone in 2007 when it was brand new, but because that device was so small, it didn't quite feel.
0:13:22Like I just lost track of time.
0:13:24The iPhone never has felt fully immersive like this.
0:13:27What to me it goes back to is when I first got my first Mac in college in 1991 as a freshman, I was in college for such an interesting period of years because in 1991 the dorms at Drexel didn't even have Ethernet, let alone Wi-Fi.
0:13:47Wi-Fi was years away from being invented.
0:13:49So there was no network in the dorms.
0:13:53And by the time I graduated in 1996, everybody had email.
0:13:58Internet was everywhere.
0:14:00It was, would have been ridiculous to just in the period from my freshman to senior year of college, it went from nobody has Internet and almost nobody has email to everybody's on the Internet all the time.
0:14:11Totally.
0:14:11Yeah, I started college in 96.
0:14:13So I was freshman class.
0:14:15We got Ethernet in the dorm room.
0:14:16It was, it was life changing.
0:14:18But I, in my freshman year in particular, like I just spent all of my free time on my computer in my dorm room, even though we didn't have the Internet.
0:14:31I wasn't a partier, you know, hardly ever went to like fraternity parties or whatever else freshmen would do.
0:14:39And I didn't get involved in the student newspaper at Drexel till my sophomore year.
0:14:43So I didn't really do that.
0:14:46I played rec league basketball.
0:14:47Wasn't like I was a total shut in, you know, and I had a bunch of friends who I kept for the rest of college.
0:14:53So it wasn't all day every night on my computer.
0:14:56But for the most part, what I how I remember my entire freshman year of college was just spending lots and lots of time on my Mac in my dorm room, not even networked.
0:15:09And then by the end of the year, I've told this story on the podcast before we set up the what was it called the Apple Talk network.
0:15:15It wasn't the Internet.
0:15:16It was just like stereo cable, like just copper wire that we hung through the drop ceiling through the floor and then dropped into everybody's room so we could play the game Specter together.
0:15:27The sort of battle zone.
0:15:29Yeah, totally remember that game.
0:15:30But if you ask me, well, what did you do when you were just by yourself?
0:15:35Like in my roommate, my freshman year did pledge a fraternity and he would, you know, Friday and Saturday nights was off and out.
0:15:41And he was a great roommate.
0:15:43He was a friend from high school and we got along great.
0:15:46But I remember it was sort of like, hey, that's great that he's getting out of here.
0:15:50Like I just not it wasn't like I was there was no interest.
0:15:54It wasn't like I was like looking at porn or anything like that wasn't that I wanted to be alone for privacy sake.
0:15:59I just wanted to be left alone to use my computer.
0:16:01Well, I know exactly.
0:16:02I know the exact answer to this question.
0:16:05Like what were you doing?
0:16:06And it's the same answer as what we're doing right now and why we want to spend time in it.
0:16:11Because you want to be immersed in that world because you've never been there before and it's super exciting and it's almost euphoric because you're doing stuff that you've never felt before.
0:16:20And it's exactly the same for the first Mac experience or whatever it was that transformed you into a person that wanted to live and work in technology for the rest of your life.
0:16:29Yeah.
0:16:30And again, I did have some games.
0:16:32There were some weekends where maybe I was playing Leisure Suit Larry or whatever the hot games were of 1991 for the Mac.
0:16:38Sim City was big.
0:16:39Shufflepuck Cafe.
0:16:40Sim City was a big one in 1991.
0:16:42Corralica.
0:16:42Oh, and there was a PGA Tour Golf that I really liked.
0:16:46But a lot of times I was just like in ResEdit just taking apart like an application and remaking the icons, you know, in the icon editor inside ResEdit.
0:16:58Yeah.
0:16:58And it could be like, I don't know, eight, nine o'clock on a Saturday night.
0:17:04My roommate would leave, say he's going to a party and next thing I know it's 2 30 in the morning and he's coming back in the room and I'm still sitting there.
0:17:15Yeah.
0:17:16And I'm like, I thought he just left.
0:17:18And then I look up in the corner of my Mac and see that five hours have gone by and I'm finding myself having that sort of, I can't believe this.
0:17:29And the way it manifests itself with this device in particular is I know it's fully charged.
0:17:34I've left it fully charged overnight and I think I'll start using it.
0:17:38I think I'll just watch a couple videos.
0:17:39I've been saving up a couple of these YouTube videos that I wanted to watch on the device about the device.
0:17:44And next thing I know, I hear this very sad bloop, bloop, bloop.
0:17:49I think the AirPods make the same sound when I get to like 20% battery life.
0:17:54And then I think to myself, I think I had this experience while trying to review it.
0:17:57I think, Ooh, I should quick write this down.
0:18:00The battery life stinks.
0:18:01I, and then I check the time and I'm like, Oh no, that's been three hours.
0:18:05This is actually much better than the promised battery life.
0:18:07How have I been in here three hours?
0:18:09Yeah.
0:18:10Also, you should just jack into your power when you're not moving around, up, walking around.
0:18:15It's just good hygiene, good practice to just connect it to power because it is going to run out.
0:18:21We don't need that experience.
0:18:22And it's only in transitory moments that this is a mobile device.
0:18:25Otherwise it's a computer.
0:18:27And you sit down and use the computer.
0:18:29And I I've gone for long periods of time as well, just losing myself.
0:18:34And I feel that the most joy I'm getting out of it in those times of losing myself
0:18:39is just figuring out how the damn machine works,
0:18:42how all the software works and really training myself to use it.
0:18:46I think the one thing that is less often talked about among early vision pro users is that there
0:18:53is a learning curve to this thing.
0:18:55And I remember when my family got our first Mac, it was a Mac classic,
0:19:00and it was set up on the dining table so the family could all enjoy this new computer.
0:19:03And you start it up and there's this onboarding program, like a game,
0:19:07like an application that would teach you how to move.
0:19:11Like if you move the mouse around, then the arrow on the screen moves and you can go up.
0:19:15You move your hand forward, it goes up and you select a word and then it drops down a list of words.
0:19:21And this was not, we didn't know this stuff already.
0:19:25You had to learn it.
0:19:26And I think that that's actually where we kind of are with the vision pro is we're still learning
0:19:30what all these conventions are.
0:19:32And of course we're way smarter about this stuff now.
0:19:34The learning is going to come quicker, but there is still learning to do.
0:19:38And so I think those early reactions is like, this doesn't work good.
0:19:41This is all, this is broken stuff.
0:19:43Well, how about maybe you haven't learned it yet.
0:19:46Maybe you're going to get better at this.
0:19:47Even something like typing with the virtual keyboard, you're going to get better.
0:19:51You're going to get learning, you're going to get better at learning the eye targets.
0:19:55You know, I heard Marco on ATP saying that he discovered that he would look at a thing.
0:20:01And before his fingers had tapped it, he was already looking away because he's looking at
0:20:05the next thing, right?
0:20:06You have to compensate for that.
0:20:08And that's not something that you like consciously learn.
0:20:10You have to intuitively learn that stuff and develop the muscle memory for it.
0:20:15And I love that we're in that phase right now.
0:20:17It's so cool.
0:20:18And in the same way that like that Mac LC had a 12 inch display on a cramped dorm desk.
0:20:25And it's like, well, how can you get fully immersed in a 12 inch display on a, by today's
0:20:31standards, incredibly slow computer that had no connection to the outside world other than
0:20:36what you brought in on a floppy disk?
0:20:38But it did.
0:20:39Right.
0:20:40And so in a sense, I would fully immerse myself and just be lost for five, six hours back
0:20:46then just learning and dicking around with the Macintosh.
0:20:50Yeah.
0:20:50So much so that families would have an entire room dedicated to that machine.
0:20:55Yeah.
0:20:55You go into the computer room if you need to immerse yourself.
0:20:58Everybody sort of learned that I think when they brought computers in their house where
0:21:02it's like, or at least if somebody was enthusiastic about it, it's like you kind of need to make
0:21:06special room for it.
0:21:08You don't want it in a room where your people are doing other things.
0:21:11I don't know.
0:21:11That's right.
0:21:12But in some ways it's like inside out with this device where physically there's these
0:21:18reminders that you're wearing a thing on your head that weighs you down and that there's
0:21:23a strap you need to adjust on the back of your head.
0:21:26Right.
0:21:26But on the other hand, what you see, you said it very well earlier in the show.
0:21:32It's like you do sort of forget that you're looking through cameras, showing you stuff
0:21:37that's projected onto screens in front of your eyes and you do pass in front of a mirror
0:21:41and you're like, "Oh, crap.
0:21:42I forgot I was wearing it even though I didn't really forget I was wearing it."
0:21:46There's a part of your brain that forgets you're wearing it and another part that can't
0:21:50possibly forget you're wearing it.
0:21:52But it kind of cleaves your brain in two.
0:21:55And the physicality of the device will only continue to get more and more diminished.
0:22:00And it reminds me of when the iPhone 4 came out.
0:22:04You got to sit down with Steve Jobs.
0:22:05And I remember you telling me the story.
0:22:08You used it for the first time and you said, "I can't see pixels.
0:22:13It looks like I'm touching the information.
0:22:16I'm touching the UI."
0:22:17And he kind of smiled because he knew.
0:22:20You picked up on this detail.
0:22:22The physicality of the artifacts of the pixels had disappeared.
0:22:29No more pixels in the iPhone.
0:22:30And I think that obviously this is version one of this thing.
0:22:34So who knows when we get to the equivalent of the version four where it really does start
0:22:41to feel like just the information in front of you.
0:22:44Pete: Look at the original Macintosh, right?
0:22:48Or like that classic that your family started with, right?
0:22:51Almost nobody would consider that an acceptable form factor today, right?
0:22:55A black and white nine-inch screen that has to be plugged into the wall and even when
0:23:00you do unplug it from the wall weighs 25 pounds.
0:23:02Nobody would consider that an acceptable Macintosh computer today.
0:23:06I tried to get at this in my review, but like eventually we will look at this set of Vision Pro
0:23:13goggles and see, well, that was completely unacceptable as a form factor.
0:23:18But the platform is here, right?
0:23:22Pete; Yeah, the proof of concept is so strong already.
0:23:25Pete; Let me ask you this.
0:23:27Here's something I don't think I touched on in my review because I don't think it
0:23:31hit me until afterwards and sort of picking it up from other people's reviews and like,
0:23:38especially with this device, like when it's just a new iPhone, which I don't mean to
0:23:43diminish with the word just, but you know, we're up to iPhone 15.
0:23:48I mean, there's been a lot of them.
0:23:49I don't feel lonely being in that week period where I have a review unit and most of the
0:23:59people I know don't have one yet.
0:24:01And you know, and part of it is that I'm such good friends with some of my fellow
0:24:06reviewers like Joanna Stern and Neelai Patel.
0:24:08And so, I do have people to talk about, you know, like when Touch ID is new or Dynamic
0:24:15Island or something like that.
0:24:16And it feels like being able to talk to like two or three other people for the week is
0:24:20like, ah, that's good.
0:24:21But with this product, I couldn't wait.
0:24:24It wasn't like, oh, I'm so special.
0:24:26I got a review unit a week of everybody else.
0:24:29Look at me, look at me.
0:24:30In fact, it just felt very lonely.
0:24:32I couldn't wait for everybody else to start getting them because it's like, I need other
0:24:37people to actually be able to say, yes, I know.
0:24:39I know what you mean, right?
0:24:41I needed that so badly with this.
0:24:43But one of those aspects is it just didn't hit me until after I wrote my entire review
0:24:48that one of the weirdest things about this product is fake reality that you immerse yourself
0:24:56in looks far more realistic than actual pass through reality.
0:25:02Yeah.
0:25:02Right.
0:25:03And it's because the virtual reality, like if you just use the immersive surroundings
0:25:12thing and say, okay, put me on the moon.
0:25:14They've either photographed or I guess with the moon rendered this stuff at the highest
0:25:22resolution possible.
0:25:24And when you encounter dinosaurs, right, it's all 3D rendered at the highest possible fidelity.
0:25:29Or you look at the documentary they have of the woman on the tight rope up on top of the
0:25:34mountain.
0:25:35Well, that was shot with crazy expensive like 8K cameras or something like multiple 8K cameras
0:25:42to get all of the 180 degree immersion.
0:25:44Whereas when I look at real reality around me with these, I'm looking at through these
0:25:50sort of effectively like cell phone quality cameras that have to go do the pipeline processing
0:25:58through the R1 chip in this crazy small amount of time.
0:26:01And so it just is backwards from what you would expect.
0:26:05You would just expect, well, reality surely is the easy part and virtual reality is the
0:26:09hard part, but it's the opposite.
0:26:11And now that I've noticed it, it's constantly disconcerting to me.
0:26:15Hmm.
0:26:16That's interesting.
0:26:17So you're finding that synthetic environments feel more real to you.
0:26:20Right.
0:26:22Even though I know they're not.
0:26:23Yeah.
0:26:24I don't think that I have the same experience and it might just be because of my own knowledge
0:26:30of how those synthetic environments are made.
0:26:32Because those are all computer generated.
0:26:34I'm fairly certain those are all modeled.
0:26:37Like the moon, the Joshua tree, and those might be an exception.
0:26:41I'm not sure, but.
0:26:42Or some kind of mix of rendering versus photography.
0:26:44Yeah, totally.
0:26:45Like high, really high res with depth mapping so that everything parallaxes when you move
0:26:51your head back and forth.
0:26:52But I feel like there's a higher bar to get to like super plausibility for me.
0:26:57Cause I'm used to artifacts in my life.
0:26:59I feel like we've, we're.
0:27:01I thought that we were all kind of like this is that we're so used to observing the world
0:27:07through cameras, through lenses and sensors.
0:27:11That we're comfortable with the degradation of the re of, of, you know, it's all mediated
0:27:16through a degraded capture process.
0:27:19So like I buy into that.
0:27:22My, my brain connects to that reality and calls it, Oh, that's reality.
0:27:26And so I, I, I don't think I value necessarily the synthetic environments as much as just
0:27:35being able to pass through and see an approximation of my real reality.
0:27:40To me, that's the mindblower and even the much, much worse version of it in the meta
0:27:45quest three, which is like full color, but all warpy and everything, a lot lower res
0:27:50to me, that's still plausible reality.
0:27:53And it's like, okay, I would take that over being closed off from the whole world.
0:27:57But, but I think that's interesting to your point about loneliness.
0:28:02It's really important to be able to communicate and share these experiences with the device
0:28:10or with the tech early on with other people who are in there and feeling what you feel.
0:28:15That's like kind of the most valuable thing for me right now, too.
0:28:18I got on, I don't know, my co-founder Beamer.
0:28:22He got, he got one on the same day and we're just like spending all day and in it and like
0:28:26FaceTiming and stuff and, and working together.
0:28:29I got one for sandwich so that our visual effects supervisor could be using it.
0:28:34Cause we're developing an app for it.
0:28:36And so that we could see the same thing because if we're going to be rendering CG models for
0:28:42this app, it's not okay to just do it in the simulator.
0:28:46Like he needs to feel what I feel and what the user's going to feel.
0:28:49I've been able to give the guest mode tour to a few people.
0:28:53And every time you get that joy of unlocking it, unlocking the experience for somebody
0:28:57who didn't know what to expect.
0:28:59Have you done guest mode with like for Amy and others?
0:29:02Yeah.
0:29:02Well, just Amy really so far.
0:29:04And on the one hand, and she was really worried about it because she has like the way her
0:29:11vision has always worked her whole life, her two eyes together.
0:29:14Well, for example, go back to the nineties.
0:29:16Remember when there was that stereoscopic poster craze?
0:29:19Yeah.
0:29:19Magic eye.
0:29:20Yeah.
0:29:21Magic eye posters.
0:29:22She could never see them.
0:29:23And she, she have two left eyes.
0:29:26I don't know why that's funny to me.
0:29:28It's sort of like that, right?
0:29:30It's like she, you know, her vision is fine in both eyes, you know, with glasses, but
0:29:35she just has trouble seeing 3D stuff.
0:29:36Sure.
0:29:37And like when she tried my quest, she saw double right away and I don't know.
0:29:43There might've been a way to adjust that.
0:29:44That's interesting.
0:29:45I don't know.
0:29:46But when she tried this in guest mode, she did not see double and expected to.
0:29:51And that was with my corrective lens inserts, which I think are a little too strong for
0:29:56her, but she liked it.
0:29:57But on the other hand, I kind of feel like guest mode is a pain in the ass.
0:30:02It is a pain in the ass for sure.
0:30:04I don't know what they were thinking.
0:30:05Like, I kind of feel like there's some easy fixes for it, but like the big problem is
0:30:11your vision pro is tied to you and it uses optic ID, which is like face ID or touch ID
0:30:17to unlock things automatically and your key chains locked to it.
0:30:21And for the most part, if somebody just picks up your vision pro and tries to put it on,
0:30:26they either need to have your eyeballs for optic ID or they need to know your numeric
0:30:32passcode for the device.
0:30:34So it's just like trying to use somebody's iPhone without their face.
0:30:37You need their code or you need their face.
0:30:38And with you put it in guest mode in control center and it's not too hard to put it in
0:30:46and they're like, but then there's like a prompt, like which apps do you want them
0:30:50to have access to so that they can't look at your email or something?
0:30:53Maybe you just want to give them permission to use the dinosaur adventure thing.
0:30:57And then you take it off and give it to them.
0:31:00And if they take it off for even a minute, then it locks again and they have to give
0:31:07it back to you and you have to go through the whole thing all over again, put it back
0:31:10in the guest mode and then hand it back to them.
0:31:12Yeah.
0:31:13It's really, it's a bummer when the flow gets disrupted.
0:31:17This is what I've done every time, which is like, first you turn on mirroring.
0:31:22Cause I, so let's say I have my Mac or I have an Apple TV.
0:31:25I mirror what I'm seeing so that they can see it.
0:31:28And then I just say, you tap your fingers together like this.
0:31:31You select something like this.
0:31:33You bring up the home screen like this and I select apps.
0:31:36And then let me show you a couple of things and I'll moving this, you know, I just do
0:31:40like a quick demo, maybe a minute and a half.
0:31:42And then I leave mirroring on.
0:31:45That's really important.
0:31:46So you can see what they're seeing and then you go and then they go through the setup
0:31:50flow.
0:31:51And unfortunately there's that friction because it needs to calibrate to their eyes in order
0:31:54to work.
0:31:55Otherwise it's going to be a terrible experience for them.
0:31:57So yeah, like Apple had a challenge in this guest mode thing.
0:32:02To me, I've had a good experience with it so far, except for the one time that mirroring
0:32:06stopped.
0:32:07And then I wasn't able to explain to the, to the guest what to do next.
0:32:11Cause I couldn't see what they saw.
0:32:12And then there's like the uncomfortableness of handing over your unlocked device to somebody,
0:32:18you know, I just, that's all my stuff.
0:32:20No, don't.
0:32:21Okay.
0:32:22Promise you won't go through my stuff.
0:32:23But yeah, I think the benefits far outweigh the friction for me right now.
0:32:28Cause this, I don't know, it's almost like they see what you see and suddenly you're
0:32:33able to speak.
0:32:34Like you, you get a shared vocabulary from it and it's no longer.
0:32:38So because, so Roxanna, my partner, it was a few days that I had the vision pro at home
0:32:45and I was using it in front of the family, regrettably.
0:32:49You know, cause I looked like such a super dork and you know, I just had to beg, like,
0:32:53this is one of the most important things that's happened in tech in my life.
0:32:56You know, in a long time, let me have this.
0:32:59And then I promise I'll let you in on what's going on.
0:33:02And she wasn't that curious about trying it out, but eventually we're sitting there in
0:33:07bed and I said, do you want the demo now?
0:33:09And she said, sure.
0:33:10We realized that if you're on the outside of this thing, I can't think of a different,
0:33:15another technology where the chasm between how cool it is to the person using it and
0:33:22how lame it is for anybody not using it is so wide.
0:33:25I can't think of another thing like that.
0:33:27And it's even so hard to reproduce in media for anybody to understand.
0:33:33And that's really regrettable, but when they cross that chasm, it's so huge.
0:33:38It's very valuable.
0:33:39And now they, you know, something clicked the first time Roxanna got the demo and the
0:33:44moment where it actually did click for her, other than moving windows around and seeing
0:33:48in stereo, it's showing her a spatial video that I shot from Christmas morning with our
0:33:54new puppy.
0:33:55And then she's like, oh, you know, now I get it.
0:33:59And that was all that had to happen.
0:34:00Yeah, it is.
0:34:02And do you find yourself, I find myself continuously and poor Amy is my victim because Jonas is
0:34:09off at college where I keep wanting to say to her over and over again, and this is now
0:34:15over two weeks running, come here and look at this.
0:34:18And I expect that if she's over my shoulder, that I can point at what I'm seeing that
0:34:24is really cool and that she'll see it because otherwise I'm in the kitchen.
0:34:29She sees the same refrigerator that I see.
0:34:32She sees the same kitchen counter that I see, but she doesn't see this cool window of
0:34:38content that I see that is right here and I cannot get it through my head.
0:34:43It comes back to this level of immersiveness and not the immersiveness in a fake world,
0:34:47like the mountain tops or the surface of the moon, but the immersiveness of these windows
0:34:53seem like they really are in the room that I'm in.
0:34:55Like right now, talking to you, I'm down here in my basement podcast studio.
0:35:01I haven't dialed up any immersion.
0:35:02I'm just, it just looks like my cluttered junkie full of boxes basement, you know?
0:35:08But it's almost unfathomable to me that if somebody came and stood behind my shoulder
0:35:14that they wouldn't see you.
0:35:15I'm in the same place.
0:35:17Like there's this sense of a shared experience that is really important to this device.
0:35:23And I think that the device really takes flight or this platform really takes flight when
0:35:28two people can be in the same space and actually have a shared space.
0:35:32You know, what Apple calls the shared space right now is in Vision OS when multiple apps
0:35:39can share space together in your field of view.
0:35:42And that's a very important version of shared space because that's something that none
0:35:45of the other VR or XR platforms have.
0:35:48That version of shared space is mind blowing.
0:35:51But what I really want is for me and my collaborator or friend to be in the same room.
0:35:58We're both wearing the thing and we decide what windows we want to look at together.
0:36:02That's going to be huge.
0:36:04Now there's approximations of that now with SharePlay that you can share your view in
0:36:09FaceTime.
0:36:10There's like baby steps to get there.
0:36:12But man, is that going to be sweet when we can look at the same windows in the same space,
0:36:16whether we're together or remote.
0:36:19I can't wait for that reality.
0:36:20That's where it really levels up for me.
0:36:23The other thing too, and it just makes me get lost in the possibilities of it.
0:36:28I can think of just off the top of my head, there's two very different ways to do that
0:36:33shared space thing.
0:36:34One is if you and your colleague are literally in the same room together, like you could
0:36:40reach out and touch each other.
0:36:41And then you'd want to have a shared window that you both see in the shared space as appearing
0:36:49at the exact same position at the exact same size.
0:36:54And then there's what if you're in Los Angeles and your pal Gruber's in Philadelphia and
0:36:59we bring up a window that we're both looking at, how does that work?
0:37:04Where it can't possibly be in the same space because we're not in the same space, but
0:37:07we're sharing the window at the same time.
0:37:10And if I resize it, do you see it resized too?
0:37:13That's a good question.
0:37:14We could literally try it right now.
0:37:16We could, in a FaceTime call, you can share any window.
0:37:20Maybe we should because it'll break our entire intricate setup for recording this.
0:37:25We'll do it another time.
0:37:26But I think that that kind of thing is something like, again, that's just like a UI pattern
0:37:31that we're going to get used to doing.
0:37:33Just like attaching a photo to a text message or something.
0:37:37That's not something that was easy when we all first got the phone.
0:37:39And now it's second nature.
0:37:41Yeah.
0:37:42And I guess one of the apps that I've spent, I like opened it up and poked around a little,
0:37:47but I guess that's maybe what Freeform is there for, right?
0:37:52It's shared canvas.
0:37:54You know, it almost makes me wonder.
0:37:57And every time Apple comes out with a new device, I think people sort of go backwards
0:38:01in time, years and think, oh, is that why Apple did X, Y, and Z years ago?
0:38:06Did the iPad cursor support start with this device?
0:38:11I don't know.
0:38:12I don't think so.
0:38:13But I think maybe Freeform did, right?
0:38:15That Freeform as a concept for an app might've started with this team.
0:38:20And they were like, well, let's build it for the phone and Mac and iPad first, and then
0:38:25we'll ship it for this.
0:38:26But that's a great theory.
0:38:28I love it.
0:38:28And there's all kinds of like handoff stuff and universal control stuff that the concept
0:38:33has been proven across other devices and now is making its way into this device and is
0:38:38really usable.
0:38:40It's like really fluid.
0:38:41Do you have your virtual Mac up right now?
0:38:44I do.
0:38:44Right.
0:38:45So I do too.
0:38:46And just using the track pad and floating the cursor off the screen and into one of
0:38:53my vision windows, and it works flawlessly.
0:38:56And same with the keyboard.
0:38:57They're not messaging that in any way when you get onboarded to this thing.
0:39:01Right.
0:39:01But the fact that we can just figure it out and that's, again, that's just mind-blowing
0:39:07that they can do that.
0:39:08Not only are all these windows able to exist in the same space, and that is literally spatial
0:39:14computing, but we're actually bringing our devices from outside of this space and inviting
0:39:19them into the space and able to interoperate with them.
0:39:22Holy shit.
0:39:23Can you believe that?
0:39:24All right, let me take a break here and bring this back to a normal episode of the show
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0:41:38Amazing.
0:41:40There's so much to talk about with this thing, and I've made a lot of notes, but I think.
0:41:45Yeah, what do you want to start with?
0:41:47One cool thing to talk about.
0:41:48We were just sort of talking about space and sharing space.
0:41:53One thing that I've noticed now after a week is the space that you're using it in makes
0:41:59a difference, right?
0:42:00So I got to participate in a developer lab because like I mentioned, we're making an
0:42:06app.
0:42:06Sandwich is making an app for this thing, hopefully launching in like a week or so.
0:42:11Can we talk about it or is it secret until launch?
0:42:14It's secret until launch, but it's in the media video space and it's and it's fun, but.
0:42:19Well, I know what it is.
0:42:21You know what it is.
0:42:23And but I don't I will.
0:42:24I will pretend that I don't.
0:42:26Okay.
0:42:26It's super fun, but we're still like polishing it, polishing the video and stuff.
0:42:31The launch video.
0:42:33So when I went to the developer lab and don't talk about developer lab, the one thing I
0:42:38can say is that when they put you in a cubicle, basically, you're sitting there and you're
0:42:44so the first time you experience vision, OS is in a very confined space.
0:42:49You've got a studio to display in front of you.
0:42:53I think that's all I'll say, except that the idea of using vision, OS at a cubicle is
0:43:00definitely not the ideal environment for using spatial computing.
0:43:04So then.
0:43:05It, you know, the real one delivers to my home and now I get to use it in my living
0:43:11room, which is the ideal.
0:43:12That's exactly where I want it to be perfect.
0:43:14And it was, you need to be able to throw windows into the distance and prioritize them based
0:43:19on the closeness to you and to be able to scale them up and down based on what you need
0:43:25in your foreground and your focus.
0:43:27But then a couple of days ago, I took it to the office so that we could do some like TikTok
0:43:33content about it.
0:43:34And our office is a big open loft space and it was an entirely different experience using
0:43:41it in there.
0:43:42That was something that I wasn't expecting.
0:43:45And really this thing is designed in such a way that it benefits from having openness
0:43:52around you.
0:43:53Cause like the analogy to a screen is kind of perfect.
0:43:56Even though there's no screen, the screen becomes the space that you're in.
0:44:00And that is suit.
0:44:01That is really that that's something that I didn't expect.
0:44:05Yeah.
0:44:07Do you think that it's sort of disappointing in so far as it sounds before you've used
0:44:14it?
0:44:14It sounds like a product and a platform where it's great.
0:44:18If you have limited physical space, if you have a tiny apartment or tiny dorm room or
0:44:24something like that, and now you can create a virtual environment and spread out.
0:44:29But the truth is it actually, I think it's better.
0:44:32That's why I use it in my kitchen a lot.
0:44:33Cause our kitchen is a big, airy open room and it just somehow feels better there.
0:44:41I almost feel like maybe that's part of the point of making the virtual environment such
0:44:45a top level part of the system is that, okay, if you are in a physical, your real room is
0:44:51cramped.
0:44:52You're going to, you're going to want to use a virtual immersion to feel like you can
0:44:57spread out.
0:44:58I think that's such a good insight.
0:44:59I think what we really want, this is an elemental thing that what humans really want is the
0:45:04sense of scale of the world or the universe around us.
0:45:07Like that's what makes us feel great, right?
0:45:10Is when we can look up into the sky and sort of like know that we exist as part of this
0:45:14huge system.
0:45:15And it's like, that is why scale is important.
0:45:17I know that like, if I can look out over the lake, the virtual lake and put a screen out
0:45:24there far in the distance, that's going to be a very meaningful, impactful experience
0:45:28for me.
0:45:29And it's going to be different from being in my cramped room and throwing a sort of
0:45:35screen against the wall or whatever.
0:45:36And it's not that far from me.
0:45:39Now I can push it out further past the wall.
0:45:42And when it like, you know, it's that really cool spatial computing design choice that
0:45:49they've made, where if the window that I'm pushing away from me knows exactly how far
0:45:56that wall is.
0:45:57And when it comes up against the wall, it starts to fade out.
0:46:00Right?
0:46:01And I can, I can keep pushing it away from me and it's scaling up.
0:46:05But now it's, it's, it's mostly transparent because it doesn't want me to put that window
0:46:11beyond the wall.
0:46:12Cause that physically doesn't make sense.
0:46:14I love that they've thought of that, but the constraint doesn't happen.
0:46:19The fade doesn't happen if you're in a giant room or if you're actually looking out into
0:46:23the world.
0:46:24So I think scale is so important to this OS.
0:46:27I don't know.
0:46:29It's just, it's something that I guess I didn't expect.
0:46:32Another thing, just talking about space and scale and windows and stuff, what you would
0:46:38expect to happen is when you, if you take a window and you, you bring it close to your
0:46:44face, you would expect that the scale of the window stays consistent.
0:46:48So let's say it's a hundred inch window and you bring it right up close to your face.
0:46:53You would think it stays a hundred inches and now it's taking up a huge amount of your
0:46:57field of view.
0:46:58But what they're actually doing is they're scaling it down to compensate for the distance
0:47:02from your eyes.
0:47:03So it's actually doing this as you push it out, it's scaling up as it gets further from
0:47:10you.
0:47:10So it's taking up the exact same field of view.
0:47:13Is that something that you want?
0:47:15I don't know.
0:47:17I like my own app that I'm developing.
0:47:19It doesn't work like that.
0:47:20Actually, if you push something out, it keeps its own scale.
0:47:24And that's actually a very enjoyable experience to have things feel like they're more physical
0:47:30because they're constrained and their scale doesn't change.
0:47:32Does that make sense the way I'm explaining it?
0:47:34Yeah.
0:47:35It's very hard for me to explain the way that the windows, I know exactly what you're
0:47:40saying.
0:47:40I can't say it better than you, but it's not what I expected, but I see why they did it
0:47:44that way.
0:47:44Yeah.
0:47:44You know what a dolly zoom is in movies, right?
0:47:48It's got this dolly zoom effect or like in the show, Severance, when he goes up and down
0:47:51in the elevator.
0:47:52You know that, you know, the show and when he's going up and down the elevator, when
0:47:59he gets to work, it does a dolly zoom effect where the focal length of the lens changes
0:48:06as the camera changes in distance from him.
0:48:08And it just has this weird sort of like time warpy effect for you when you move a window.
0:48:14I kind of love it, but I also kind of don't.
0:48:16That's something that, I don't know, it's really interesting the way that that works.
0:48:23What do you think now that we're like, what are we here?
0:48:28An hour-ish in.
0:48:29Yeah.
0:48:30Like, I feel like this is, I don't know that I want to do this every week or every episode
0:48:38of the show.
0:48:38I have mixed feelings about it so far.
0:48:41Yeah.
0:48:42Oh no, great.
0:48:42Let's talk about personas.
0:48:44But on the one hand, it does feel and sound like the most intimate episode of this show
0:48:51I've ever done.
0:48:52Yeah.
0:48:52Other than the ones I've actually recorded in person with somebody.
0:48:57Right.
0:48:58Because you never do remote video with the show.
0:49:01You've never done it.
0:49:01Almost never.
0:49:02Only like occasionally like during COVID with the Apple people.
0:49:05Right, right.
0:49:06It's a totally different experience recording a podcast with somebody and looking at each
0:49:12other on video.
0:49:12Yeah, but this is very different than using Zoom or regular FaceTime.
0:49:16Totally.
0:49:17It is far more intimate.
0:49:18And the sound too.
0:49:20I've got AirPods Pro in, so I'm still getting spatial audio.
0:49:23But you don't sound like Adam in my headphones.
0:49:27You sound like Adam somehow here in front of me.
0:49:30Yeah, agreed.
0:49:31Yeah, we sound very present with each other.
0:49:34And it's very intimate.
0:49:35I don't hate it.
0:49:37It's just like it's a lot.
0:49:39It's like a high intensity experience.
0:49:41And I think, yeah, like there's something to be said for just getting on the phone and
0:49:46chatting.
0:49:46You know what I mean?
0:49:48There's something to be said for a low fidelity connection.
0:49:54I don't know what it is.
0:49:55It allows the other senses to sort of extend themselves to make the connection.
0:49:59And right now, all of the senses are extended.
0:50:02Like our senses are in the same room.
0:50:04Right.
0:50:05It's like somehow by far more infinite than any remote episode of the show I've ever done.
0:50:12But at the same time, exhausting?
0:50:14Yes.
0:50:16Yeah, I know.
0:50:18It is.
0:50:20Well, I can back off.
0:50:23You can take, I wonder what it feels like to just push your window away.
0:50:27Now you're bigger and you're further away from me.
0:50:30I don't know.
0:50:30I have been playing around with, while we're talking, I've been playing around with moving
0:50:34in and out of the moon.
0:50:35And it's interesting what it does to the audio.
0:50:38Oh, interesting.
0:50:39Yeah, because it sort of isolates you.
0:50:41Because there's no sound bouncing around in the moon.
0:50:46And which is something that the Vision OS actually does, which is that it treats your
0:50:51audio as though it's bouncing off of all of the surfaces of this room.
0:50:55Right.
0:50:56And now that I've just dialed up the moon again, and now it's even more, again, it's
0:51:03not like your voice in my headphones.
0:51:05It's like you're a voice in a room, but there's nothing else.
0:51:07Yeah, I'm on the moon now too.
0:51:09This is cool.
0:51:10I also find the audio out of the built-in speakers on the headset to be startling.
0:51:17And I know it's a visual device first.
0:51:19It's literally called Vision Pro, but the audio is astonishing.
0:51:23It truly is.
0:51:26There are something like six mics on the device, picking up sound in every direction.
0:51:31And these incredible directional speakers that sit right above your ears.
0:51:35I wish that they figured out how to, when you're using your Mac virtually, I wish that
0:51:42they could figure out how to route the sound back to the Vision instead of just playing
0:51:47it out of your Mac speakers.
0:51:49Yeah.
0:51:50That would be cool.
0:51:51Oh, here's the other thing I noticed about sound that I made a note of is that all of
0:51:57the sound effects in the OS are like really rich and deep and sci-fi and cool sounding.
0:52:03But the one that is not is when you send a text message to someone and it goes, is that
0:52:10really thin sound?
0:52:12And I don't know why, I don't know why they thinned that out so much, but it feels like
0:52:18a choice.
0:52:20What do you, how do you feel about your persona?
0:52:22Like just...
0:52:23I don't know, cause I don't see it.
0:52:25Yeah, you don't see it.
0:52:26I'm looking at two of you and one of me right now this whole time.
0:52:30And I also realized that for anybody watching the personas on the YouTube, the video version,
0:52:36both of our eyes are shifting around a lot in a way that we would never be doing if we
0:52:40were just looking at each other on Zoom.
0:52:42Right.
0:52:43We're in computer space right now.
0:52:45Right, but I know that you're looking around your environment, so I don't think it's weird.
0:52:48I think it's gonna be, it's gonna look like we're glitching to people who are watching
0:52:53the video, but it doesn't seem unnatural to me that you're not holding my gaze for over
0:52:58an hour.
0:52:59Yeah.
0:52:59Yeah, well that's good.
0:53:01All right, I'm gonna take another break here and thank you for the next sponsor.
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0:55:23>> Great. Can we talk about the home screen?
0:55:28>> Yeah.
0:55:29>> If we're sort of like coming to the final act of the episode, I want to talk about the
0:55:35home screen and the OS and sort of like the software experience of it and then broaden
0:55:41it out to where it fits in that language, where it fits into the all the other Apple
0:55:46devices that there are and see if we can come to some sort of conclusion of meaning of where
0:55:53this fits for the world.
0:55:55But just starting with that home screen, what's that like for you?
0:55:59The fact that it's early days, that it's that set of app icons that you can't reorder,
0:56:06you know, the way it moves, the way it feels, the constraints of it, what it doesn't have,
0:56:12no doc, that kind of thing. What's your assessment so far of the home screen?
0:56:16>> I think it's kind of surprising you can't reorder it at all. It's arguably the most
0:56:23beta-ish feeling thing of the whole system.
0:56:26But on the other hand, I'm kind of used to it.
0:56:33>> Yeah.
0:56:34>> And so what happens as you install more apps is they just get installed, like that
0:56:38first home screen you don't get to play with. That's Apple's apps.
0:56:42And then everything else you install just gets sorted in alphabetical order after that.
0:56:47>> Which is kind of crap because sometimes your favorite apps are later in the alphabet.
0:56:53My app starts with a T, so that's a problem. But I think reordering is probably coming.
0:56:58I also sort of wonder whether, similar to the watch, you know, it's been years and years,
0:57:03I think it hasn't been since the first watch that I actually had the grid view of the app
0:57:09home screen instead of list view. But you can also use an iPhone app to reorder your
0:57:15apps or remove some of the icons or whatever, or just take apps off of your watch. So I
0:57:20wonder if there's maybe like an intermediary solve is whether there's like an app on the
0:57:25iPhone or something that allows you to reorder or manage your vision of OS apps. Might be
0:57:32kind of a cool solution.
0:57:33>> Yeah, maybe. I don't know. What do you think about it so far? I guess the other thing
0:57:38is there aren't that many apps that I have yet, but it's like on the one hand they do
0:57:42want to brag that there are 600 native apps in the store.
0:57:45>> Sure, but they're all in that one folder for iPad compatible apps, which is kind of
0:57:49a bummer. I don't know. I find myself most often invoking apps just with Siri because
0:57:55it's kind of, it's a little bit of friction to navigate over in the home screen and, you
0:58:00know, and then select from that folder. But the ones I'm coming back to over and over
0:58:05again are like Slack and Calendar and things that things aren't native in vision yet, but
0:58:15there's an iPad version.
0:58:16>> And it's kind of, it's not weird, but it's different than the other platforms that
0:58:21there's no dock where you can put your most used apps.
0:58:24>> Right, yeah. I don't know what's coming there. The other thing, I mean, I don't mind
0:58:30it. I like it. It's just, it's not something that I'm interacting with all the time.
0:58:35Because most of the things, if they require your attention, they'll just come to you,
0:58:41right? You'll get a little notification or whatever. And I think the premise is that
0:58:44you can just like keep a lot of windows open at the same time and then just turn your head
0:58:49wherever you need access to that app, which is, I mean, it's connected to the Mac in
0:58:55that way that it's the only other device that has multi-app, like this kind of multi-app
0:59:00use for multi-purpose at the same time.
0:59:03>> Where stuff is side by side.
0:59:05>> Yeah.
0:59:05>> Yeah.
0:59:06>> Yeah. I like it. Visually, I didn't realize this until a few days in, but spiritually,
0:59:13it's the most similar to the watch home screen, right? In the way that it looks, the iconic
0:59:22way, the circles that are staggered. And I think it's a cool visual effect, how you
0:59:27swipe left and right in the home screen and some rows move slower than the middle row
0:59:33and they sort of like de-focus on the edges. It's really interesting in that way. I don't
0:59:40know. I'm into it. I can't think of a better way to manage your apps for this thing.
0:59:44>> I think it's interesting and I keep calling it a home screen too, but they call it the
0:59:49home view because it's not a screen. It's just sort of a view that gets overlaid over
0:59:54whatever's in front of you right now. And I guess that's sort of the thinking is that
0:59:58the whole home view sort of is the dock. It's just a dock with everything. I don't know.
1:00:04Again, it's just one of those things where it is like our biggest complaint, or at least
1:00:09the most obvious complaint is that you can't reorder the apps or customize the order. And
1:00:14I don't know what the answer is to that. Presumably, I would think it would just be like the iPhone
1:00:20where you put them into jiggle mode with a long press or something. Maybe they have a
1:00:26much more ambitious idea. I don't know. But it is the sort of thing that I find myself
1:00:33losing half an hour of time just thinking about. And I'll just sit there and play with it and
1:00:38slide it back and forth. I don't want to do it right now. I just don't want to screw up
1:00:45this call. You know what I mean? Because I do find myself occasionally screwing things up
1:00:50Do you find that sometimes, for example, I find myself closing Safari tabs when I want
1:00:55to activate them because the tab is relatively small and the button is part of the tab. And so
1:01:03it's pretty easy to be looking at the close button when you want to close the tab or when you just
1:01:08want to activate the tab. And there's a couple of other things. And it gets back to your point
1:01:12that Marco mentioned where it's almost like I feel so comfortable basically with the look at it with
1:01:21my eyes, tap it with my index finger and thumb that I went from feeling, "Oh, this is weird and novel.
1:01:30I better go slow." That only lasted like a minute back in June when I had my first demo at WWDC.
1:01:39And every experience since, I feel like I want to, I feel like a precocious child who wants to
1:01:46impress the teacher by racing ahead and zipping through this interface as fast as I can.
1:01:52But the truth is I can think faster than my eyes can stay on the same target while my fingers tap.
1:02:03Right? And so that thing Marco said, and I've seen other people in their reviews mention it,
1:02:08is you look at the button and you know you want to tap it and you see that it's highlighted and
1:02:15your fingers start to do the tap and your eyes are already moving on to the next thing you want to do
1:02:20and then your eye, by the time your fingers actually tap, your eyes are somewhere else.
1:02:25Yeah.
1:02:26And so it is, I guess that's, I don't know why I'm bringing it up in the context of the home screen
1:02:34or home view. No, no, it's all right. It's all in the same category of just like how do we manage
1:02:40all this stuff and move around in it. And to me it connects to the home screen because,
1:02:45or the home view, because something that I'm doing in the Mac and the iPhone, iPad, whatever,
1:02:51is constantly switching between apps. And I find that without a keyboard, there's just no great
1:02:58way to do that, to do app switching. Like I'm command tabbing and that's probably the thing I
1:03:04do most in the Mac is command tab. And there's not any, or in the iPhone, you're doing the bottom up
1:03:10gesture to switch between apps, doing that constantly. So there's not a good gesture yet
1:03:16for doing that, for doing app switching like that. Apparently it's coming in the next, or it's in the
1:03:21next, the beta of the next OS update, but to just automatically bring the app that you've just
1:03:28selected back into the foreground, that's a pretty important thing to do in terms of app switching.
1:03:33The thing that changes the game for me, and I think it's almost like important for anybody to
1:03:38know this who's thinking about using a vision pro is like getting a, like a small magic keyboard
1:03:44is a game changer, especially for Safari. I find like for closing tabs, for opening new ones, for
1:03:50going directly to the URL bar is just going to be at least three times faster to do all that stuff
1:03:57than doing it with your eyes and your fingertips. Right. And as big and bulky as this headset is in
1:04:04the travel case is, did you get the Apple travel case? I did. Yeah. It's beautiful.
1:04:09Were you surprised by how big it is? I expected it. I've got a case from the
1:04:13meta quest and I kind of know that just like to fit all of it in there, it's gotta be that big
1:04:19for the configuration. It is very nice though, right? Yeah. It's super nice, such high quality.
1:04:25And feels sort of futuristic. I mean, and again, I haven't taken it out of the house yet,
1:04:30so I don't know how it might. My observation in my review is using a white fabric
1:04:35seemingly means it's going to get scuffed up and dirty by sticking it underneath airplane seats.
1:04:42Yeah. I think it's pretty resistant to dirt and stains and stuff.
1:04:45Maybe. I don't know. It kind of, I always joke. Do you ever see that picture of the Pope? It was
1:04:50like an AI deep fake. Oh, you should put Balenciaga. Yeah.
1:04:54Yeah. It made it look like he was wearing this super cool, and it's like, well,
1:04:57why doesn't the Pope have a cool winter coat like that? He kind of should, right?
1:05:01But it looks like it's made out of what I imagine that imaginary white puffy coat fabric to be made
1:05:08out of. Yeah. It's so NASA. It's super spacey. Yeah. NASA, right. It seems astronaut-y as we're
1:05:14talking here on the surface of the moon. Yeah. I love it. And I came back out into my room
1:05:18because I didn't, I was getting bored of the moon. Like I'm a real world man. But I do wish that the
1:05:25I want a case that has space for the magic keyboard. I tried to get one of those tiny
1:05:29Bluetooth, like HTPC thumb keyboards, but it just wasn't, wasn't doing it for me. You really,
1:05:36cause you really need to like look at those things in order to type with them.
1:05:39But a small, like I feel the magic keyboard is tiny in size. It's lightweight and it's got a
1:05:47full configuration of the keyboard layout and you can hide windows and close tabs and type way,
1:05:56way, way easier than with the virtual keyboard. You know, I love my mechanical keyboards and it's
1:06:02funny cause I have an old key cron one. I don't want to spend time bitching about it, but I,
1:06:06I spent a surprisingly it's Bluetooth, which is why most mechanical keyboards require a wire.
1:06:13But I guess the they're sort of catching up to the world where most of them, or at least most
1:06:19of the newer ones have Bluetooth too. But this key cron K2 that I've had for, I don't know,
1:06:24five or six years now, maybe longer is the only Bluetooth mechanical that I have in the house.
1:06:29Jonas took a bunch of my other ones with him to college, but I couldn't get it to pair with this,
1:06:35even though like I've paired the magic keyboard and I'm 98% sure the problem is I eventually did
1:06:42enough research that the key cron I have only supports Bluetooth 3.1 and Bluetooth now is up
1:06:50to like five point something or maybe even six. And I think that's what it is. I think vision OS
1:06:55doesn't support Bluetooth older than some cutoff and this keyboard, even though it works with all
1:07:01my phones and iPads and max, whatever, but as much as I'm a fan of mechanical keyboards,
1:07:08I do have to admit that imagining traveling with this headset, the magic keyboards,
1:07:13almost insane light weight is like, it's like you can't imagine Apple's. I never, and I never
1:07:20really thought about it before, but you almost wouldn't want it to be any lighter weight,
1:07:25right? It would almost, it would be like you could blow on it. It would blow around like a sheet of
1:07:30paper. Right. I just want to be like, I throw it in my tote bag cause I bring it around with me
1:07:35in the Mac, but I, I would love an all in one, but you know, it's just like, I didn't appreciate how
1:07:42crucial an accessory it's it was going to be for the vision pro because the virtual keyboard as
1:07:49great as it is for when you don't, when you don't have anything else and maybe when you don't want to,
1:07:56you don't want to dictate it, you know, virtual keyboard, you can figure it out. You can pack
1:08:01hunt and pack. You can look at keys and tap is way slower and that's fine. Like how else are they
1:08:08going to solve for that? I would hope that people don't think, Oh, I can't use the physical keyboard
1:08:14cause it's a step back. It's not native to this tech. I absolutely think it is just like, it's
1:08:19a keyboard is important for a Mac. Yeah. I almost feel like it's, it's not worth worrying about. I
1:08:25mean, I, if they have some theoretical panzerino and I, in the last episode of the show, we're
1:08:29talking about the, the way everybody imagined virtual keyboard to work would be to project
1:08:34one onto a tabletop in front of you or do it, you could set up a tray, the, the food tray on your
1:08:41airplane and tell the device project a virtual keyboard in front of you. And then you could just
1:08:48type on that. You know, that's an obvious idea, right? I mean, it's been in science fiction movies,
1:08:55everybody can, you know, so maybe Apple's been working on it. Maybe there's somebody's there
1:08:59making progress on it. Maybe that's a pipe dream. And that for multiple reasons would,
1:09:04will never actually work because you don't get any physical feedback from it, right?
1:09:09You'd be even the slightest click to keys is sort of important to the field of typing.
1:09:15But I think getting caught up on the fact that you can't natively type. Well, I don't think,
1:09:23you know, somebody will have a typing contest with this thing eventually. And some kid is going to
1:09:27type in an astonishing rate just by staring. Yeah, I saw one. There was, there was a typing
1:09:32contest on already on Twitter. Yeah. And somebody, somebody was prodigious. Yeah. Yeah. I, one of my
1:09:44favorite things to do with the vision pro is just use my Mac in it. And there's a keyboard there
1:09:48right in front of me. And there's plenty of solutions to that problem. I guess where I'm
1:09:54going though, is it most people need a physical keyboard to really do actual writing work with
1:10:00this thing. That's not worth worrying about that much more than the fact that we need actual
1:10:04speakers on the headset to hear each other and that there need to be two 4k displays in the
1:10:10headset in front of our eyes for us to see the world around us. The keyboard is just a part of
1:10:15the physical nature of the device. Yeah, I agree. A hundred percent. Yeah. It's I do find this is,
1:10:22this is one of my nits with the current version of the OS is that that virtual keyboard is always
1:10:29popping up in your face, reminding yourself that it's there. Like even if you have a physical
1:10:35keyboard attached, it should, I wish that it was a little bit more intuitive about knowing that
1:10:40because anytime there's a text field, the virtual keyboard is right there blocking my view.
1:10:45Yeah. And I don't know why sometimes I don't even know why. Sometimes I do know why I'll be like,
1:10:51Oh, I was looking at the, or like in the messages, right? There's the little text box at the bottom
1:10:58of the window where you've put the input focus when you want to type a message to somebody in
1:11:04messages and you're like, Oh, I just wanted to move the window around, but I looked up a little
1:11:09too much and I saw the text field highlight and then I tapped my fingers and now I'm stuck with
1:11:14this keyboard. I don't want, but then there's other times where the keyboard pops up and I
1:11:18don't even know why I don't, I can't even imagine what it was I was looking at that made it look up.
1:11:23Yeah. And also, I mean, it's very intrusive, but also I can't figure out what the purpose of the
1:11:28text preview is in the, in the virtual keyboard. Oh, why would I need that? Because what I'm
1:11:34typing is going into the field that I'm typing in. So I think that's about people who need to
1:11:41look at the keys on the physical keyboard, but that's the, there's a similar pop-up above the
1:11:48physical keyboard. Like it shows up above your MacBook keyboard. If you pair your MacBook with
1:11:53your thing and it's like having the iPhone's auto-complete bar on a physical keyboard.
1:12:01And I think the reason is to support people who look at the keys while they type.
1:12:05Fair enough. That's as good as, that's as good as any answer. And that's good enough for me.
1:12:09This is where I'm, you probably don't remember such devices, but like when Amy and I were in
1:12:16high school, you know, I didn't have a computer at home. I had a word processor. And the word processor
1:12:22was really a glorified typewriter and mine only had like a one line LED display. So in other words,
1:12:31the current line that I was typing, I could see, you know, like almost like a calculator, black and
1:12:39white, very super fat pixel display. And then when I hit return, that line would get flushed from
1:12:47memory and clickety-clack, clack, clack, clack, typed onto the piece of paper and the word processor
1:12:53and then move on to the next one. And I remember Amy in high school had a word processor with a
1:12:58five line display and it could save like a whole file at once in, on an actual floppy disc, like
1:13:05an award perfect document. So she could take it to like a PC and read it. But that's what it reminds
1:13:11me of, that you get like this sort of one line buffer of text right above the keyboard before
1:13:18you actually send it. But it does, it seems so anachronistic, right? It's like, I'm throwing back
1:13:25to like a word processor my parents got me like in 1989 for my sophomore year of high school for the
1:13:32sort of, you see one line of text before you actually commit it for lack of a better verb.
1:13:38- Yeah, I think all it took was you using the word support for the people who need that style
1:13:44of typing and I was sold. What do you think about just for the last kind of topic, why don't we go
1:13:52down the list of all the other Mac products and figure out how it ties together or Apple products?
1:13:58'Cause that's kind of like the big thesis that I was kind of coming to is that all of them come
1:14:04together. Every device in the ecosystem is sort of connected to this one in an interesting way.
1:14:09- Before we do that, I have two grab bag topics before we get there. I think that's a good final
1:14:16topic. Number one, do you find it surprisingly hard to drink any kind of beverage while you use
1:14:22this product? - Yeah, totally. I think, yeah, coffee cups, coffee mugs are hard as Joe Aniston
1:14:28noted that a wine glass is hard. So yeah, it seems like you're drinking water out of maybe
1:14:34like a smaller like mouth hole right now. - Right. - Yeah. - My friend, Mike Davidson,
1:14:43you know Mike Davidson. He got it and it was like, how come you didn't tell me I should have bought
1:14:47bottled beer before getting it? - Yeah, or a CamelBak or like lots of cray straws for your jumbo,
1:14:56your big gulps. I think that's what we're gonna need in the future. - But there's a real physical
1:14:59problem with the way that the headset comes forward from your face that I guess the other guy,
1:15:06everybody, I don't know, did you have an uncle like this? Everybody I knew had an uncle who would
1:15:10at some point in your childhood take you aside like at a family holiday gathering and say,
1:15:16"Hey, I don't know, I'm not telling your parents how to raise you or anything, but you know,
1:15:21it's incredibly rude for you to put your nose in a glass while you drink."
1:15:27And I was like, "Oh, I didn't know." I thought it was like elbows on the table or whatever.
1:15:31And then I would try to drink without putting my nose in the glass. - That's such a good uncle guy.
1:15:38- Yeah, and it was my uncle, my mom's uncle actually did, he was more like a great uncle or
1:15:44whatever you call like the uncle equivalent of a cousin, Stosh, good Ukrainian name. And then it
1:15:50took me like three or four tries and then realized, and then I look over at him at the table and he's
1:15:56laughing at me and I'm like, "Geez," you know. But there is something to that, like the way that your
1:16:02nose does go into a glass inevitably as you drink from it that is impossible while you wear this
1:16:08device out in front of your face. - Yeah, the thing really protrudes and like it's, I don't
1:16:14know, I've caught myself bumping it up against things, not knowing that I was too like that
1:16:19close. And it's, which the only reason I care about that is 'cause the thing scratches easily
1:16:24and I don't want scuffs all over my dang computer. - Yeah, the other grab bag topic was the fact that
1:16:33there is a bit of light leak around your nose all the time. And to me, again, this is another little
1:16:41thing I picked up from my in-store buying experience. And then this was from the guy
1:16:45at the store who had no idea who I was just giving me the thing and he's like, "How's that fit?" And
1:16:50I was like, "Yeah, I feel it's good." And he's like, "Do you see any light around the sides?" I'm like,
1:16:54"Nope." And he goes, "I'll bet you." But he goes, "You do see a little light around your nose?"
1:16:58And I said, "Yes." And I've been thinking about this with my review unit for like 10 days
1:17:02beforehand. And he goes, "That's totally normal. That's actually by design. It's sort of an
1:17:07anti-nausea thing. It keeps you a little bit oriented. And it also is an anti-fog thing
1:17:14that there's some kind of air gap so that the inside of this thing doesn't get hot and sweaty
1:17:19and foggy. And nobody—all the times I had all those demos in the media and Apple—with every
1:17:27product, Apple PR wants to present the product to reviewers in an optimal way and let you know
1:17:33everything you should expect. Nobody ever told me that. I thought it was like my weird big nose,
1:17:38maybe, or something. Everybody I know. And then I've gotten so many texts from friends who got
1:17:44theirs afterwards and they're like, "Do I have a bad light seal? I see light around my nose."
1:17:49Over and over and over again. I don't know. And it feels like a total drop ball on Apple's part
1:17:56that they didn't emphasize clearly enough. And if they did, then I just completely missed it.
1:18:01That at least around your nose, there's supposed to be a little light leak. And I completely forget
1:18:09about it about 45 seconds into putting it on every single time. Every single time I'm like, "Oh,
1:18:15I see that little light leak around my nose." And within a minute, I don't notice it. I haven't
1:18:20thought about it, talking to you here, until I've just looked at my notes where I was like,
1:18:25"What was the other thing I wanted to make sure I brought up?" And it was the light leak around
1:18:28the nose. Yeah, I never think about it either, mostly because I come from the meta quest. I've
1:18:34had the VR headsets back going to the Oculus DK1. And this one, the light leak around this device
1:18:43is so much better than any of the others. So I don't know, in the meta quest, you actually
1:18:50consider it a feature because a lot of times, because there's no interoperability of the devices,
1:18:55you're not getting notifications in the meta quest. So a lot of times you just need to look
1:18:59down at your phone and you do it by tilting up your head and you glance through the hole in your
1:19:05hole above your nose. So I can see that being a feature. I can see it also being very hard
1:19:10to message that for Apple, because it sounds like it's bullshit. It sounds like they're taking a bug
1:19:16and calling it a feature. That's exactly what I think. I think that they probably, there's somebody
1:19:21at Apple who's listening to this podcast and they're like, "Yes, we had 27 different meetings
1:19:27about whether we should mention the light leak around the nose or not." And that there were
1:19:31people on both sides and eventually somebody was like, "No, let's just not talk about it because
1:19:35it sounds like we're making excuses." Yeah, I think that's probably right.
1:19:38Yeah. What else? Oh, I know. The other thing is, I do want to get to your ecosystem question,
1:19:45because I do think that's a good final one. But there's another thing that I kind of feel,
1:19:50like where, I'm going to go there. Where do you think this introduction would have been different
1:19:56if Steve Jobs were still around? Oh my God, amazing question.
1:20:00Wow. Well, I think that he would have demoed it.
1:20:06I do too. I think they would still be doing on-stage demos. I don't know what they would
1:20:14have done during COVID. And then I think he would have insisted they go back to the old way, or
1:20:22the old way with some adjustments, but that there still would be live on-stage events.
1:20:27Yeah, that's the way that Steve always was. He was so iconic for his ability to model an experience
1:20:33for the people that were supposed to understand it. And I don't think that he would have had a
1:20:39second thought about putting the thing on in front of an audience and then showing his persona off,
1:20:44even if it had limitations. He would have proudly shown that off. And because he's Steve with the
1:20:50reality distortion field, everybody would have lapped it up. He's got an iconic presence,
1:20:56so it would have translated to the persona. Who knows whether they would still be doing,
1:20:59if Steve was around, if they'd be doing that more very intricately crafted style of video
1:21:06presentation that they do now. I think a lot of that is just because Tim probably isn't the
1:21:11showman and demonstrational presenter that Steve was, and they know that, like know thyself.
1:21:19So instead, what Tim is able to bring together is this incredible operation where he sets up a story
1:21:28that takes you on a journey from person to person. The whole product experience takes you from space
1:21:37to space and flies it around like it's the future, like cameras are weightless. And I think that that
1:21:43is Tim's deal, but if Steve had demoed this thing, it would have seemed that much more miraculous
1:21:50when we saw it introduced. Yeah.
1:21:52Pete: And until the Vanity Fair cover story dropped, there was this repeated, endlessly
1:22:01since June, notion from the people who either deliberately just to be contrarians or whether
1:22:12they just honestly felt, I think this product is not a good idea, that they just kept saying over
1:22:18and over again that we haven't seen, there's a reason why we haven't seen any Apple executives
1:22:23wearing this thing. You look ridiculous. They know you look ridiculous. So they're not even
1:22:27letting themselves be photographed. And I've mentioned this, I think I'd mentioned it with
1:22:32Panzarino last week, but it still frustrates me because if you really think about the dynamics of
1:22:37how they unveiled it and how they hold events now, there's no context where that would have made any
1:22:42sense because they don't do live on stage demos. And when Tim Cook went to the hands-on area
1:22:49afterwards and was photographed in front of one, they weren't letting anybody try those. Those were
1:22:55just sort of hardware so you could see the hardware and look at the band or whatever else,
1:23:00but it's not the sort of product where it makes sense. Like you could go out after you deliver
1:23:06the big keynote for the new iPhone and you go out to the hands-on area and there's hundreds and
1:23:11hundreds of media and photographers. It's a scrum for lack of a better word. And they can make room
1:23:19for Tim to come up and approach it and poke his finger at the new phone and touch one of the
1:23:25buttons or something. But with this device, that doesn't make any sense. You don't just touch it
1:23:29briefly or point at it or something. You have to, there's no context for it. Only a live demo would
1:23:36have been a reason why you would have seen Apple, someone from an Apple executive doing it. And I
1:23:40think Steve Jobs definitely would have. I do. And I'm not saying that that means that they should
1:23:46still be doing it. I just think when you've got the greatest live demo guy of all time,
1:23:53you're going to keep using him. Well, there was an earthquake just now in LA. It's still going on.
1:23:58You should have up to the cliche or anything, but we're shaking. Okay, it's over. That was Steve
1:24:04just sending a message. He agrees with us. He agrees with us. All right, here's a specific
1:24:09thing that I think Steve Jobs would have presented very differently from Apple now. I think Apple
1:24:15is very, very shy about the external battery pack. Lauren Good from Wired had a story
1:24:23before it shipped where she pointed out that in all of the photos they took of us in the media
1:24:30who got hands-on demos two weeks, three weeks ago, that the Apple photographer who took those
1:24:36pictures for almost all of us strategically took it from the other side or the cable was
1:24:44de-emphasized in everybody's picture and the actual battery pack was out of the frame.
1:24:50We were usually pictured from like mid chest up while the battery pack is on the ground.
1:24:56I think Steve Jobs would have done like, it's like jujitsu where he would have said,
1:25:03"This battery pack," and let me show you how are we powering this incredible computer. Well,
1:25:08we're powering it with the best battery anybody has ever made. Look at it. It is beautiful.
1:25:14This is an ingenious solution to a design problem and look how we've figured it out.
1:25:22It's called battery, right? You would have failed it up and everybody would have lost their shit and
1:25:28applauded, right? Right. And every one of our competitors is trying to stick their battery on
1:25:34the strap or they're trying to stick it on front of your face and it gets hot and it's stupid and
1:25:40we've made it over here and we have this great new cable that'll connect to it. And this device
1:25:46is such a supercomputer that it needs a big battery and the best place to put a big battery
1:25:50is right here in your pocket. Yeah, exactly. Perfect messaging. Yeah, maybe there's not
1:25:56that style of messaging anymore. There's not really that style. I find that Apple doesn't
1:26:02do that style of messaging of like, "The world's best. We cracked it and nobody else could."
1:26:09They almost message everything as a plain statement of fact. They just describe things
1:26:19rather than make big claims, but Steve's whole vibe was making the big claim because he could
1:26:25back it up. And sort of knowing when he was bragging about the thing that really was worth
1:26:32bragging about. For example, like the iPhone 4 being the first consumer level device with a
1:26:37retina display. That and like you said, not only made the pixels half the size and made them so
1:26:43you couldn't perceive them visually, but simultaneously that was the display that put
1:26:49the pixels even closer to the surface of the glass, which seems like would be less of a big
1:26:56deal, but was almost as big a deal to making the iPhone seem more futuristic. Well, that was truly
1:27:02next generation stuff. But like when the first iPhone came out and only had 2G edge networking
1:27:08and it was super slow, he didn't make apologies for it. He was like, "This is amazing. Look at
1:27:12this. You're on a cellular networking. You're loading the new yorktimes.com." And yeah, he did
1:27:17it live on stage and it really was slow because he really did do the demo and it really did come in
1:27:22over edge and it took a long time for it to load. But he just, you know, it was an internet
1:27:29communicator all in one device. There's a great line in the great rule writing handbooks, the
1:27:36Strunk and White. And the white and Strunk and White is E.B. White, who's the author of Charlotte's
1:27:42Web, was a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker. And Strunk, I forget his first name, but he was
1:27:47White's college writing professor at Cornell or wherever the hell he went to school. And
1:27:53it's a funny book. It's worth, as a writer, I think, rereading every couple of years because
1:28:00it's like, "Ah, that's good advice. I always forget about that. I should do that, blah, blah, blah."
1:28:04But it's not even writing advice, but Strunk has this line where if you're reading aloud and you
1:28:10come across a word you don't know how to pronounce, say it loud. If you don't know how to pronounce it,
1:28:17say it loud. He repeats it. Trust me, I know what it's like to not know how to pronounce words.
1:28:22Pete: Yeah, you're the king.
1:28:23John: I'm the king. And so, that advice really struck with me where it's like, I'm also,
1:28:29I'm surprisingly self-conscious about the fact that I, there's dozens and dozens of words still
1:28:36in my vocabulary that I encountered as a young reader made my best guess as to how they were
1:28:41pronounced and then my brain cemented that guess into place.
1:28:46Pete; It's endearing, I love it.
1:28:48John; But the idea that you just, "Ah, go with it. Say it loud. Say that word that you don't
1:28:52know how to pronounce even louder than the other words." That's like what Jobs would have done with
1:28:56the battery. Yeah, the battery does suck that it's outside and it's heavy and it gets warm and it's
1:29:00attached to a cable that you forget is always attached to you and if you just stand up and
1:29:05don't have it in your pocket, it falls or something like that. Screw it!
1:29:08Say it loud! Say it's the coolest battery anybody's ever made.
1:29:12Pete; Well, I think one of his methods of storytelling was always to include the audience
1:29:17in the journey and in the problem that was being solved in a way that they don't really
1:29:21necessarily do anymore. He always wanted to say, "Listen, gang, it's really hard to do this shit
1:29:28and these are all the things that we're coming up against and this is how we solved it and I want
1:29:33you to be as excited as I am right now." And it was always genuine. That's what he got a thrill out of.
1:29:40Pete; I totally agree. All right, ecosystem.
1:29:44Pete; Ecosystem. So yeah, like, just making sense of this thing and defining it in my first week of
1:29:49using it, it's like, "What the hell is it?" And I found just kind of like drawing connections to
1:29:55all the other Apple things that I use, I found like it was useful to sort of define it
1:30:02in context of how we would define all the other stuff. Because I do really think that that is
1:30:08this, that is kind of a, like, that is a startling innovation of this device that only Apple could do
1:30:16because they have built this ecosystem, right? That's where they win is because that's how they
1:30:20make this thing the most useful is that they tie it all together. So like the Mac, for instance,
1:30:27it's like, I brought it up before, it's a multi-window workstation. You bring multiple apps
1:30:33together, you can sort of like look at them and work with them simultaneously to do a lot of stuff
1:30:38at once and it's all in this pretty well controlled experience within a rectangle of a screen.
1:30:44And I think that there's a lot of similarities with the Mac in the Vision OS in that sense. It's
1:30:51that it's a Windows-based experience where you can bring all these Windows together
1:30:56in the world's biggest display because it's your space that you're in and you can
1:31:02use it to get a lot of stuff done or just experience a lot of stuff, whether it's consumption
1:31:07or creation. That's kind of like one of the things that strongly defines it, including the fact that
1:31:15you can actually bring your Mac into the space and work with an actual Mac while you're doing it.
1:31:20Does that resonate with you?
1:31:21I think it's even more than that though. On the one hand, one of the surprising aspects of the,
1:31:29going back to our home view discussion, is how many of Apple's own apps still aren't native to
1:31:35Vision OS, right? Like Calendar is still actually just the iPad app. The only native Calendar app is
1:31:40from our friends at Fantastic Al right now. Hold on, let me actually bring it up and look in that
1:31:46folder. Calendar, the Books app, Maps is still an iPad app. But you look at the ones on the
1:31:54home screen, the first home screen that you don't get to adjust, and you kind of get a sense of what
1:31:59Apple sees as the key apps of the whole, not of the device, but of the ecosystem, right? Apple TV,
1:32:07Apple Music, Settings, App Store, Notes, Photos, Safari, Freeform, which I do think sticks out
1:32:15as something that most people don't think of as one of the most used Apple apps, right?
1:32:21But I think it sort of speaks to, that's the one that sort of gets elevated as maybe being
1:32:27especially useful on this device.
1:32:30Yeah, the most aspirational, I would say.
1:32:32Mail, Messages, and then Keynote. And like I've joked before, all three of the iWork apps
1:32:38are equal, but Keynote is more equal than the others.
1:32:41(Laughter)
1:32:42Yeah, I agree. And then that demo of the rehearsal environment for Keynote is a showstopper.
1:32:48Right, right.
1:32:49But I think you're right, Freeform is a great one. It's aspirational and it invites you to
1:32:55participate. But I think front and center, like Photos is right in there in the middle because
1:32:59to me that's the highest priority app for the Vision Pro.
1:33:02In that list, and so there's, mindfulness is on that screen. I don't use the mindfulness stuff.
1:33:09It's very cool, but I don't use it either.
1:33:12Yeah, so there's a couple of exceptions there that I wouldn't say as cornerstones of the ecosystem,
1:33:18but the ones that are the corners of the Apple ecosystem, Safari, not necessarily in this order,
1:33:25I don't know. But it's almost impossible to prioritize them. Photos, Mail, Messages, Notes,
1:33:32Safari, they're all there. My bookmarks are all there. My history syncs across them with iCloud.
1:33:40So like if I'm looking for Casey Neistat's video going around New York while wearing it,
1:33:47I was just looking at it on an iPad, but I want to see it on this because I want to make it big.
1:33:52Well, as soon as I start typing YouTube, my history fills in and it's like the second one there.
1:33:56Oh, it's already right there. All the notes that I took while using this connected to a keyboard,
1:34:01and I'm sure you've got like a whole pile of Apple Notes piled up with your observations of this.
1:34:06Yeah.
1:34:07The fact that they're all there and then when you're grocery shopping 15 miles from home
1:34:13and with just your phone with you and another thought comes into your head,
1:34:17"Oh, I wanted to try blank next time I'm with Vision Pro," and you take out your phone
1:34:21and there's your notes and you just peck it out with your thumbs on your notes.
1:34:25And then the next time you're using Vision Pro, you're like, "What was that thing I wrote to
1:34:29myself at the grocery store?" It's right there. It almost sounds superficial because these are like
1:34:36the most, we think of them as basic apps. Well, you have to have a Notes app. You have to have
1:34:41a web browser. You have to have an email app. But the way that Apple has made these apps feel
1:34:49native and first class on everything from phones to Macs and now this gives them this
1:34:56incredible leg up over, I mean, who's their closest competitor? I think most people would
1:35:01agree it's probably Meta. The Oculus hardware division has been very well regarded for years
1:35:10and that they're sort of doing a bottom-up strategy trying to go from $500 devices
1:35:18and make them better year over year and Apple's coming from a, "Okay, let's start with our minimum
1:35:24viable awesome product. Oh, it's going to cost $4,000. Well, we'll make it cheaper as time goes
1:35:29on year over year." I think that's an interesting strategic difference, right? That Meta is, and
1:35:36Meta also has the Ray-Ban glasses. And you've worn, what was the product that you had that
1:35:40was more glasses like? It's not from Meta. Oh, it's called X Real Air. Yeah.
1:35:45Yeah, X Real Air. And you know, you let me try them at WWDC this year, in fact. Yeah,
1:35:51it was, and really, it's not like, "Holy, holy friggin' shit," like this. But it is like,
1:35:58"Oh, wow, that's cool. I could see now what you're talking about." Once you let me try those on,
1:36:03everything you had said good about them made a lot more sense to me than I believed beforehand.
1:36:09Right.
1:36:09But it still is more of a bottom-up approach. Let's start with the reasonable.
1:36:12Yeah, they're single function, just like, MetaQuest is essentially single function as well. It's a
1:36:17gaming device and, yeah. But we're... So, I think that strategic, complete opposite approach, do we
1:36:26start with $500 devices and grind it out year over year to make those $500 devices better, or do we
1:36:34start with a $4,000 device and try to bring it down to a reasonable price? Let's see how it goes.
1:36:42Kind of feel like Apple has more experience with hardware platforms, and so not just my personal
1:36:49fandom of Apple's products, I just kind of feel like you're betting on a proven winner if you
1:36:55think Apple's strategy is better. But where I feel like people aren't even talking about it is that
1:37:00Meta doesn't have any kind of ecosystem like this of their own web browser, their own notes app,
1:37:08their own email. How do you get your email on this thing? How do you get your email accounts into it?
1:37:13Yeah. No, they're not thinking of that at all. Even their own user account system in their own
1:37:19gaming device ecosystem is pretty broken, as is Microsoft's. Google's is probably the furthest
1:37:26along in terms of tying your user account into different spaces, not necessarily different
1:37:32hardware, but it transports from platform to platform, from site to site. There's something
1:37:40that Google knows about you as a person that is very transportable, but Meta doesn't have that.
1:37:45Microsoft tries, but really spectacularly, clumsily fails.
1:37:49Yeah, Google is definitely the closest, but it's hard for me to... And again, maybe it's my bias
1:37:56because I don't like Google's style of such things. I just don't. I don't like Google Keep as a notes
1:38:04app. It doesn't fit with my brain. And Apple Notes isn't my very ideal of a notes app. I tried making
1:38:12my ideal of a notes app 10 years ago with Vesper. I mean, I have strong opinions on notes apps, but
1:38:16notes is a lot closer to the way I think a notes app should work than Google Keep is. I personally
1:38:25don't like Google Chrome as much. And putting aside the rendering engines, I just don't like
1:38:29the interface to it as much as Safari. And the further you get into the ecosystem, the more...
1:38:36Like people who use the actual Gmail interface, when you type gmail.com into a desktop browser,
1:38:43it doesn't look anything to me like the Gmail that you get on your phone when you open the Gmail app.
1:38:49It looks like two totally different interfaces to it. Whereas Apple's mail looks like it's not
1:38:56the Mac version shrunk to the iPhone, but it looks like a sibling product from the same designers
1:39:02and that they, "Oh yes, this is what the phone version of this desktop email app would look like."
1:39:08There's definitely design aesthetic and spiritual consistency across
1:39:14products in the different platforms. And Apple Music and Apple TV. There's a reason why on the
1:39:22home screen, the very top left position is the TV app. Oh, absolutely. Going back to the home screen,
1:39:28something... I came across this the first time I was trying to add a contact in the Vision Pro,
1:39:36and there is no contacts app. Right. If you look over to the left of the home screen, you've got
1:39:41that little drawer that slides out and it's apps, people, and environments, which is essentially
1:39:46things, people, and places. People, places, things. Apps is like functions, tools.
1:39:53People, they just want... If you tap on that, you open up people and you just get a list of
1:40:00people that you commonly communicate with, which is bizarre, but it's an interesting way of thinking
1:40:06about it. This morning, my friend texted me a VCF, like a contact, like you can do, share a contact.
1:40:14I opened in the Vision Pro and I tried to do anything with it. It wanted to save it as a file
1:40:21in my files app. And then so I saved it as a file. And then when I went to open that file,
1:40:26it was just like, "Congratulations, you have a .vcf file. I can't do anything with this."
1:40:32So it's just like that people space in your home view tells you a lot about what VisionOS
1:40:43prioritizes, I think. Do you think though that there's a chance that... Because this is where
1:40:49you and I together sort of got the Apple Watch wrong, right? You and I both bought into when
1:40:57it was debuted the communication features, the, "Oh, if you've got a sweetheart and you both have
1:41:03an Apple Watch, you can share your pulse with your sweetheart as a sort of a remote gesture
1:41:11of affection." Right. I remember, I think, walking down the street in San Jose, like just
1:41:17dreaming big dreams about how that shared heartbeat was going to be the killer for the watch.
1:41:23And it's funny now so many years later, and I don't even know if the feature's there anymore.
1:41:28Maybe there's a way to get to it in messages, but nobody talks about it. But
1:41:31I'm happy to just say, "Well, I was wrong." But I think Apple was wrong, and I think it sort of
1:41:39comes as close to admitting that they were wrong. But I also think it was worth trying
1:41:43on Apple's part, and I don't think it was foolish that we thought, "Hey, maybe there's something
1:41:48there there." Right? Yeah. I mean, they were just trying to forge human connection into the
1:41:53product, which is, that's great. But I wonder if it's that same desire to forge human connection
1:41:58into the product that has made them make people as top level of a thing as apps and environments.
1:42:05Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. I can kind of make, maybe this time,
1:42:11they've got it, this time it's right that it is personal and it's worth having people there
1:42:16so that you, that's how you start a FaceTime call. There is no FaceTime app either. You go to people,
1:42:22find the person, and then it says, "Well, what do you want to do with Adam? You want to start
1:42:26a FaceTime call?" "Yeah, I want to start a FaceTime call." "Okay, start a FaceTime call."
1:42:29Or, "Do you want to start a voice call or something?" I guess you do.
1:42:33Which essentially tells you that that's how Apple ties it into the iPhone, is that that part of the
1:42:39product they're calling a communicator, right? Right. So, yeah, there's, so you can message
1:42:45a person, FaceTime them, and then there's a dot, dot, dot where you can do more. You can email them,
1:42:50get info, pin them. Right. That's Apple basically saying the vision is your OS for the people in
1:42:58your life. Right. It's how you make those outward connections. And so that's kind of cool. I mean,
1:43:04again, tying it into the ecosystem, they're assuming that people are going to be using
1:43:09this thing, at the same time as they're using it as like a Mac for multi-window, multi-APIC
1:43:16workstation, they're going to be using it as a communications device, which I'm fully on board
1:43:21with. We've been doing it for two hours now, and it feels as natural as anything. Yeah, it does.
1:43:27I guess it's good that the Newton exists in the sense that it, I think it's still, I think there's
1:43:36very few people, just because it was so long ago, that there's very few people at Apple left who
1:43:41were there for the Newton, but it's a humbling platform because, you know, there's no other way
1:43:48to describe it than as a failed platform. It was around for a couple of years. And I know that the
1:43:52people who were the staunchest aficionados of the Newton platform are, I'm sure some of them listen
1:43:59to my podcast, and I'm sure they're angry right now. And they still blame Steve Jobs that it wasn't
1:44:04that the Newton failed. It was that, you know, when they had to cut costs to save the company
1:44:09from bankruptcy, they cut it when Jobs came back, and maybe he was biased against it because it
1:44:16wasn't his creation. You know, and I think there probably is something to that, that,
1:44:19and the Newton had a lot of good things going for it. But where I'm going is, is this possible that
1:44:26this vision headset will be the next Newton for the Apple? Fuck no. Like, I don't think that,
1:44:32I think that's the wrong statement to make about this thing. You shared that Beeple tweet.
1:44:38Why do you think there's no way that it's a Newton?
1:44:40Because the Newton was so far ahead of its time. It was so constrained by the available tech at
1:44:46the time that it could never have delivered on the promises of the product, right? This thing is not
1:44:52ahead of its time. It took until this time to make this product real. And to me, it's spectacularly
1:44:58successful at it, even as hobbled as it may be in vision, in version one, this product is exactly
1:45:06of its time.
1:45:07Yeah. I would say like the defining, what does it, what does that mean? What does it need to
1:45:13be ready right now? It needs super high resolution displays and that's, it has these, right?
1:45:20Everybody's impressed by the visual resolution. I think it needs really killer sound. I think even
1:45:28like I said, like it's called vision pro everybody's most blown away by the visual experience,
1:45:32but I think that the spatial audio either through the built-in speakers or with AirPods that do
1:45:38spatial audio, it, the spatiality for lack of, I don't even know if that is a word, but you know,
1:45:45it, it is important. I think that the stability of the placement of 3D objects where they stay
1:45:57exactly in place, not like, Oh, if you leave a window in your kitchen and then you walk out of
1:46:04the room and come back and it's, ah, it's like almost in the exact same space, but it's like two
1:46:09inches. No, it is literally to the inch in the exact space where you left it. I think it needs
1:46:15that. I think that's actually important to the experience that these things don't flicker. They
1:46:19don't wobble a little bit in space. They are as a stable in three-dimensional space and it needs
1:46:27pretty good input. You know, it needs good enough finger gesture recognition. They've got all of
1:46:34that, right? That's the sort of baseline. I can't think of anything else that it really needs. I
1:46:38mean, I guess you could say it needs a fast enough CPU or I guess that R1 chip is the sort of
1:46:45breakthrough. The fact that it has this incredibly low latency from the cameras to the screens in
1:46:54front of your eyes that reduces the nausea inducing latency of other headsets and makes it
1:47:01more comfortable for some people just to even use for five minutes and then for other people just to
1:47:07be able to use like for this, what are we on to two hours, 15 minutes of this call, something like
1:47:12that. It needs all of that. And the Newton didn't have that, right? The Newton, I would, I've always
1:47:18thought the big glaring thing in hindsight was that the Newton never should have come out before
1:47:23wireless networking. If they waited for wi-fi, that would have been eight or nine years, seven
1:47:29or eight years, something like that. They would have had to wait for a long time. But what was
1:47:34the point in hindsight? I know I just said that I spent my freshman year in my college dorm using
1:47:39a Macintosh computer without a network, but there was a lot that I actually, I felt like I was doing
1:47:45stuff and making and creating stuff. Whereas the Newton wasn't really a creative device. You didn't
1:47:50make artwork on it. You didn't- No, it was a PDA, but it had terrible handwriting recognition. So
1:47:56the input sucked. And it was the butt of every joke. You know, the naysayers remark though would
1:48:04be, well, didn't we just complain about the onscreen keyboard in this thing? Yeah, but that's,
1:48:09the onscreen keyboard is one of four different input methods for communicating into the thing.
1:48:15Whereas with the Newton, it was the pen was the only one. Yeah, exactly.
1:48:19You couldn't just hit a microphone button and dictate to it to get around the handwriting
1:48:24recognition. Yeah. And remember that the General Magic device had internet connectivity or, you
1:48:29know, cellular connectivity too. So I don't know that that's necessarily what felled the Newton.
1:48:36And I know Palm, and before Palm came out with the trios, right? That was what they called the
1:48:44cell phone ones, which was, it did, it was a huge leg up for the Palm platform because then they had
1:48:51some networking. But using this device and seeing a couple people, not even trying to troll or shit
1:48:58posts, but just sort of tossing it out as a spitball, like it's just a mental exercise. Well,
1:49:03debate the side that this might be the next Newton in Apple's history. And just think about it.
1:49:10It makes me realize it comes to that ecosystem question, or topic that you had,
1:49:16where this product, in addition to having all that hardware tech in a, I would say,
1:49:24you could say it's too expensive, but at least if you've already bought it, and it's in your budget,
1:49:28it's all there. The thing that this product has that the Newton didn't is this incredibly rich,
1:49:36broad shared ecosystem with the other devices in your life. And at the time the Newton came out,
1:49:43the only other product Apple had was the Mac. And you did technically, if you, you know,
1:49:50there was a, what was it called? Like Newton Connection Kit or something like that. Did
1:49:53you have a Newton? I didn't. It's not even worth Googling. I guess I'll make a note and put it in
1:49:59the show notes. Well, I had a Palm, which is a close enough comparison. And there was like Palm
1:50:04Sync, which was always a huge pain in the ass. But that's how they tried to leap over the,
1:50:11cross the bridge of the ecosystem. So it was an early proof of concept.
1:50:16So there was some kind of rudimentary way that you could get your contacts from your Mac into
1:50:22the Newton, but the Mac didn't even have an address book at the time, right? That was from an era
1:50:28on the Mac where Microsoft and Apple as the two big platform makers sort of demurred from
1:50:38providing lots of first-party applications. You'd cut open the seal on your brand new PC or Mac,
1:50:45and it didn't really have much on it that did anything out of the box, right?
1:50:50They had chess, but they didn't have contacts until it was done.
1:50:54And the Mac didn't even have chess, I don't think. That was a next thing, right?
1:50:59Oh, I thought the Mac had chess for some reason.
1:51:01I don't think so. I don't think in the classic era. I think that all came over from the next
1:51:05year. I don't even think it had a game. It had the puzzle game. The 16 squares where you slide
1:51:11the numbers around in a rudimentary text editor just for reading read me files and stuff like
1:51:17that. So there wasn't any kind of way, even if you were a diehard Mac user and you're like, okay,
1:51:23I'm all in and now I've spent all this money to buy a Newton communicator. Where's all my Mac stuff?
1:51:30There were none of the apps were the same. There was no shared data infrastructure. So even
1:51:36forgetting that it didn't have wireless networking, even with a cable, you weren't really sharing
1:51:40a foundational layer of ecosystem apps like a note app, right? You just didn't have any of this.
1:51:48Whereas all of this is already there on day one with vision and it's all this stuff. How
1:51:53many notes here? I'm going to look at my notes. I have to turn my head. I have 1,851 notes in
1:52:00Apple notes. Yeah. I use bear, but they're going back to like 2011 or something like that. Yeah.
1:52:06So how many, you know, you've probably got like a thousand notes, thousands already on day one,
1:52:11right? And they're just there. You just log in with your iCloud account, which you didn't even
1:52:16have to do, right? I just brought your phone up to your thing. Oh, you're, this is your phone and
1:52:22it's nearby. Okay. We'll just, we'll get your wifi password from your phone. We'll get your iCloud
1:52:28account from your phone and this stuff will just start piling in. Yeah. And we know it's you because
1:52:34of your Iris, which is equally crazy or whatever it is because of the, you know, your eyeball.
1:52:40It's so easily overlooked because you just think, well, it's just a notes app. And of course the
1:52:46notes app that the platform maker makes should sync across your various devices. And of course
1:52:51your bookmarks and your browsing history should sync across devices. And if you get a new email
1:52:58address, like you changed the sandwich.co instead of whatever, you know, sandwich video, you guys
1:53:04change your domain at some point. Yeah. We're sandwich.co. Yeah. We are sandwich.co. And so
1:53:08at some point in the last couple of years, I changed your email address and my contact,
1:53:13and I only had to do it once. And on all my devices, I have your new email address, right?
1:53:18You think, well, of course it should work like that. But I think that there is,
1:53:22if you really think about how much work that is under our feet for this ecosystem, it is,
1:53:28it's mind boggling, right? And I don't think a company like Metta, even though they're big
1:53:34and have lots of money and lots of engineers, I don't even think they're trying to catch up.
1:53:38No, for there was a time in the Oculus days when Metta was going to make it so that in order to use
1:53:45their VR, you had to have a Facebook account basically. And man, I was so pissed off about
1:53:53that because I'd already deactivated mine long ago. They corrected that decision and now you
1:53:59can just have a, you know, an account for the Metta Quest that's not connected. But even that,
1:54:04I think they were like edging towards that. They were suggesting that they were going to try to
1:54:08build an ecosystem that was all tied together so that they could advertise to you everywhere equally.
1:54:14But it's not happening. And there's just so much smart, brilliant building going on in the Apple
1:54:23world that in Apple space, you could almost call it, that ties it all together. And I think just
1:54:29like moving down the line. So this is what I've got on my list, Mac, iPhone, iPad, watch AirPods,
1:54:35Apple TV, and a whole bot, right? These are all the main core products. So moving on down to iPad,
1:54:43really you've got, what you've got is a small screen and a media device, like a small screen
1:54:48entertainment media consumption window. And I mean, that's here, that's here in VisionOS.
1:54:57It is that if the one of the pillars of defining this, the Vision Pro is it as a media consumption
1:55:05device. It's a huge screen media consumption device. Remember back in the days when we would
1:55:11discuss whether Apple was ever going to make its own TV screen, right? Well, they just did.
1:55:16And it is enormous. And that's really fun. That's a great fun way to spend time thinking about this
1:55:24thing. And it's one of the things that people bring up the most often is like, "Oh, wow,
1:55:28I don't know if I'll do any work with it, but I know I'm going to watch movies in this thing."
1:55:32Pete: I tried to touch on that in my review, right? Where I really do think this is a credible
1:55:40$3500 device if it's just for watching movies and including those 3D immersion type things. And
1:55:47you've got to be, as a professional filmmaker, it has to be so, like, I don't think my writing
1:55:55reads better if you do it in Vision Pro in a big 10-foot safari window, right?
1:56:01JS What's your favorite, just as an aside, what's your favorite way for people to read your writing?
1:56:08Like what platform? JS I don't really have an opinion on that.
1:56:12Pete Okay. JS But I guess,
1:56:14you know, it shows how shameful it is that I don't really have an iPhone optimized layout for the
1:56:24site. But I would guess maybe the iPhone or the iPad, you know. I guess the iPad, I would say,
1:56:30would be the best way. If you said, you know, if I was heading off to prison for five years and I had
1:56:39a goodbye post, you see in five years, what's the best way to read that? I guess I'd say the iPad,
1:56:46because it's a little more intimate than the Mac, you know.
1:56:49JS It's the in-between device, I think.
1:56:51Pete Yeah, and it doesn't quite feel like trying to gulp down water dying of thirst
1:56:57through a tiny little straw like the iPhone screen can be for a long article, right? Like sometimes,
1:57:03even I who write long articles will sometimes look at a long article on my phone and be like,
1:57:09"I'll save that for later." But for watching videos, this is flabbergastingly good. I mean,
1:57:17just unbelievable. And it makes me realize, like in a way that the groundwork of the ecosystem of
1:57:27these apps was there for this platform to launch with already there, where you've already got mail
1:57:34messages, notes, Safari, and all of your core apps. One thing I've noticed watching like YouTube
1:57:41and stuff on this device is it really makes it obvious why it's worth it's been worth for years
1:57:49now shooting 4K video. Because to me, where 4K video really shines over the last two weeks isn't
1:57:57watching it on a 4K TV, where it's just sort of one to one. It's when you make a giant window here
1:58:05that's actually too big for 4K, right? You're actually stretching beyond the limits of,
1:58:13you know, ideally for a window the size that I've made most of my YouTube videos in Christian
1:58:18Selig's Juno app should be shot in 8K, right? It's an 8K-sized virtual window in front of me,
1:58:25but people aren't shooting 8K yet. They're shooting 4K. But because it's 4K and not 1080p,
1:58:31it looks way better than 1080p, right? And it looks better even stretched to the point of a
1:58:37bit of graininess and noise by making the 4K so big, it's the best 4K has ever looked. And it's
1:58:45like, I can't believe it. I really did. Did you watch Casey Neistat's video? I know it's got like
1:58:51six million views. It was my favorite of all the videos, I think. Because he expressed the ineffable
1:59:01somehow, right? But some of the just random shots, they weren't setups, you know? It was like he's
1:59:07out in Times Square. He just decided to wear the thing with a battery pack to keep it going all
1:59:11day. And he and a photographer, he was just walking around Times Square. One chance to get
1:59:17the shot. But looking at it, it was like, they just put this together in like 24 hours, and it
1:59:25looks unbelievable. Yeah, well, I think that the main takeaway of that video, that he says at the
1:59:32end that he wasn't even expecting to get out of it, because he was just going to go out into Times
1:59:36Square as a joke, as like a goof, as a stunt. I think that he was able to, in capturing that
1:59:42experience, he was able to communicate the concept of scale in the Vision Pro, which,
1:59:48the, as we've talked about during this call, that's what the device is about. It's about putting
1:59:54windows bigger than you could ever have access to in your office, on your desktop, in your laptop.
2:00:01And he went to the largest scale place of the largest city in the country, and where the
2:00:08screens are enormous and on the sides of buildings. And he was like, "Fuck you, I can do this too."
2:00:12And he put his screens everywhere, and it was like, that is what this device is. And I think
2:00:16it was breathtaking for him as he was riding around on a skateboard. And he just sold that
2:00:21to the audience, and I loved it. Because in a way, I think part of what made his video so genius
2:00:26is you're definitely not supposed to go out and about in daily life with this thing. That's not
2:00:31what it's intended to be. And he emphasized that you're, and like I say over and over again,
2:00:35your windows remain static in space. And so when you see these videos of most people goofing while
2:00:42they're crossing the street while wearing a Vision Pro or they're coming out of the mall wearing it,
2:00:46and they're making these gestures with their hands as they walk, that's all fake. It's obviously fake
2:00:52because none of the windows in, almost none. It's like there's a couple that stay hovering in front
2:00:57of you. When you connect AirPods, it'll say, "Hey, do you want to connect these AirPods?"
2:01:01That window will stay as you're walking, will stay an equal distance in front of your face.
2:01:07But 99% of the interface stays behind as you walk. So all the people making these videos where
2:01:14they're pretending to gesture at things while they walk across the street are faking it. Whereas
2:01:19he mentioned that. He was just being completely honest. And by wearing it in a place where it's
2:01:26not really meant to be used, Times Square, New York, and showing the footage of what he was seeing,
2:01:33it's somehow the wrongness of using it there showed off the amazingness of what it's capable
2:01:41of doing. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you kind of briefly mentioned it, but as a tool for
2:01:48filmmakers, for visual storytellers, the opportunities here are so exciting. I think
2:01:55hopefully most of the industry is thinking in this way, but not only are we now thinking of telling
2:02:01big scale stories because we've got access to these big scale screens,
2:02:06but telling stories in three dimensions, we now have access to in an intriguing way that most
2:02:13people don't want to put 3D glasses on. But if they're already in this thing, they're going to
2:02:17want to see stories in stereo. But also for me as a technology storyteller, telling tech stories
2:02:25about this tech, about this space is so much more compelling than a shot of the iPhone over and over
2:02:32again, over the shoulder. I've been stuck in the rectangles, in the boxes for 15 years of doing
2:02:38this now. And finally we get to put this stuff in floating in space the way we've been trying to do
2:02:44it for all these years. How many times do you think you've composited fake iPhone screens?
2:02:49Oh my God, hundreds or maybe thousands. At some point, one of my friend, Tim Karas,
2:02:54who was doing a lot of those early comps with me, we were doing a green screen app for the phone,
2:02:59and we were going to make just a compilation reel of all of the sandwich over the shoulder device
2:03:04shots. But yeah, that technology is so squainty, the quaint at this point, those small screen
2:03:11experiences are so quaint relative to this. And it's like I know YouTube started as a desktop
2:03:18website and however big a display you have connected to your Mac or PC was how big you
2:03:23could make a YouTube video. It just feels like though, coincidental or not, I think YouTube
2:03:34exploded in popularity when mobile exploded in popularity. There was some kind of fit between
2:03:41seven to nine minute video short films and what you could want to watch on your phone
2:03:49while you're sitting on the subway or while you're waiting in line at the grocery store or wherever
2:03:55else. And it was fantastic for popularity and it's made YouTube a world changing platform.
2:04:05But creatively, like from your perspective, it does sort of come back to the David Lynch argument.
2:04:12Don't watch my fucking movie on your fucking cell phone, right? Like I don't, it's meant to be
2:04:18looked at at a big beautiful screen. And now it's like we've gone through the looking glass
2:04:23and these anybody, any kid with a phone that has a, and every phone you can buy from the
2:04:31last few years has a really good camera on it. And you can make movies that are movie theater
2:04:38size and look good movie theater size. So some of us at Sandwich got invited to meet with the Apple
2:04:44pro team because they wanted to talk to us about shooting real professional video in log space with
2:04:51the iPhone 15 pro. And it was a transformative meeting for me because I was not thinking in
2:04:57that direction. We've always used the high-end digital cameras to shoot our commercials.
2:05:01I'm so glad we, though they invited us cause we started doing it just last week. We shot our first
2:05:06like legit startup, commercial sandwich video with multiple iPhones. And it looks fantastic. And you
2:05:14using some of the pro capture apps, either black magic or, you know, Sebastian's got Kino coming
2:05:20out that allow you to capture these images in like really high resolution and log space.
2:05:27So you can do a lot more with color and post and it gives everyone access to being filmmakers,
2:05:34whether professional or not, and making true films that is incredible. And it's not only incredible,
2:05:40just on its own for making video, but it's incredible for this device too. It's incredible
2:05:45that we're going to be able to capture in the phone, watch these things in vision in large,
2:05:52enormous scale screens. And what a time, what a world.
2:05:56I've, there's just people whose work I've never seen on a big screen before. Really. I mean,
2:06:03I guess you might be one of them, right? It's like, you know, and I've watched a lot of your
2:06:09videos over the years, but I've never seen one maybe a handful of times on a TV and never on
2:06:17anything bigger than a TV. And now I can watch everything you've ever shot on a legit movie
2:06:23theater size screen. Right. Oh man. That's exciting. It's emotionally so different and
2:06:29so much more engaging. Right. And it's, it's just terribly exciting as a consumer of video.
2:06:37I can't even imagine how exciting it is as, as a filmmaker. Yeah, it is. I watched a star Wars. I
2:06:43watched the last Jedi in the Disney theater in that experience. That was really great for me.
2:06:50Yeah. It's super, super exciting. So moving down the line that we've got the watch next on my list.
2:06:56All right. And I actually think that like for when I got to the watch, I was thinking, okay,
2:07:02well there's nothing in common with the watch vision pro has nothing in common with the watch,
2:07:06but I was absolutely wrong because first of all, that the home view is very visually similar to
2:07:12the home view of, of the, of the watch home view, but also just the, the hard, the, the design,
2:07:19the hardware design, you've got the digital crown in common, which, which is kind of fascinating to
2:07:26me that those are the only two Apple products that work the same way. And also basically if you take
2:07:31the light seal off of the device, and even if you want to take the straps off too, and just look at
2:07:36it or hold it in your hand as a piece of hardware, it's actually pretty reminiscent of the Apple
2:07:43watch in its roundness and like the seamless joining of the, of the glass and the metal.
2:07:49So yeah, that's, that's all I would say about that. Otherwise there's not a lot of crossover.
2:07:55Yeah. All right. Next on your list. AirPods. I mean, really spatial audio and the idea that
2:08:02audio can be augmented reality. Yep. And I've been saying that argument, making that argument,
2:08:09at least since the noise canceling AirPods came out that they're Apple's first AR product.
2:08:14Yep. But using this feels like seamlessly stepping from one platform to another without
2:08:22even worrying about the gap or any kind of it's like, Oh yeah, this is like AirPods plus plus.
2:08:27You know? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's so usually they say augmented reality is when you're just
2:08:33adding a layer of digital on top of the real, but I think that the vision pro is an augmented
2:08:40reality cause it's actually replacing it's reproducing reality. So it's more like virtual
2:08:43reality. I think, I think that's the technical definition, but the AirPods do the same thing.
2:08:49They reproduce this, the sound reality of your world and they use that to make it feel transparent.
2:08:56Yep. And I'm just playing around. I don't know what you can see in my persona. I'm playing
2:09:01around with my digital crown. I've spent most ever since we started talking about whether I was on
2:09:06the moon or in my, in my basement, I've settled into the moon and I just dialed it back to my
2:09:14basement and I realized again, I'll just say the same thing again. It's just uncanny how intimate
2:09:21you sound when I'm dialed out to the moon and then it's not trying to bounce your voice off
2:09:26these walls in this room. It is it's intimate really. I honestly, this is something I'm
2:09:35just spitballing here, but you, I mean, just to break the fourth wall a little bit, you and I are
2:09:42close personal friends, right? You're like a dear friend. And I don't know that I would like doing
2:09:49this if with a guest on my show who I don't consider as dear a friend, you know what I mean?
2:09:54And I know most of the people I have on a regular basis are my friends. And so most of them it would
2:10:00work, but you know, I occasionally have special guests on who just have a new product out or
2:10:05something like this. I almost feel like talking like this to somebody for two hours is too much,
2:10:10right? It's like being, you and I can get in a car together and go on a four hour drive and we'll
2:10:16talk each other's ears off the whole time about this same stuff. It's like, but if you were with
2:10:20a stranger, you don't want to be caught in a car with them for 20 minutes.
2:10:24No, I wonder if there's other ways of creating more distance if it's an uncomfortable intimacy
2:10:29in this context, whether, I don't know, I almost like, to me it was almost fun to like the idea
2:10:36of sharing, because I have my MacBook camera on me looking like a complete dork with big goggles on
2:10:41and in front of a microphone. And I almost like want that in the corner of my, you know,
2:10:48my FaceTime window. So you can see like, oh, it's actually not that intimate. I'm actually just
2:10:52sitting, I'm a real guy in a real place and probably have food in my beard.
2:10:57[Laughter]
2:10:58No, you don't because you're an idealized version of you, you're a persona, right?
2:11:05And I know that everybody's slagging on personas, but I'm really enjoying this call.
2:11:10I am, and I feel like it's you. And I do feel like there's this other aspect where it's like, man,
2:11:16you can just wake up and you don't have to comb your hair. You don't have to do anything. You
2:11:21don't have to worry about, you know, oh, I didn't even take a shower. I've got the same shirt on I
2:11:25had on yesterday. Well, it doesn't matter because your persona has the shirt on and when you captured
2:11:30your persona.
2:11:31Yeah. I joined a Zoom call, a client Zoom call with like five members of my team, three members
2:11:36of the client side. And I joined it in Zoom on the Vision Pro, but I kept my camera off
2:11:41for almost the whole meeting until like the last two minutes. And then I was like, okay,
2:11:46let's try this. Let's see, let's experiment, see what happens. And we all know what it's like that
2:11:52first initial shock of seeing a digital persona in a flat window is like, take it away. But then you
2:11:59move past it very quickly.
2:12:01Yeah. All right. Next on your list, you have Apple TV.
2:12:04Apple TV. Yes. I mean, that's pretty clear. It's Apple TV used to be the biggest screen,
2:12:10big screen media browser. And it's now there for the communal experience of watching media.
2:12:16I'm very excited when vision becomes more prevalent because then it can become more
2:12:21communal as well. But that's what a TV is. It's for there to be an object in your space that
2:12:28people can sort of like look at at the same time and enjoy the same entertainment.
2:12:33And then the last one is HomePod, but that's almost not even, it's same as spatial audio.
2:12:41It adjusts itself to the physics of your space and it's also a Siri client. So I guess that's
2:12:49how it ties in. But yeah, no, all sort of laddering up to this idea that the vision is really,
2:12:55it's not its own thing. It's sort of everything all at once. It's a container for every Apple product.
2:13:01Yeah, it kind of is. I'm not envisioning a future and who knows, maybe we are,
2:13:08especially when they, 15 years from now, 20 years from now, when these things really are
2:13:13just like glasses. Maybe I wake up in the morning, I put my glasses on and I've got this OS in front
2:13:21of me until I go to bed, take them off, put them on my nightstand and that's when they charge.
2:13:26I don't know. But if me and Amy both wear the glasses, then we don't even need a TV.
2:13:31We are having a shared experience next to each other on a couch and we're not isolated with
2:13:36goggles. We just have glasses on, but we can see the same movie or TV show. Maybe, but even if that
2:13:44never comes to pass, I feel like there's something about the fact that this does encompass all of
2:13:50those products. It really does. And it's right now, it's in a very personal way that's just for
2:13:56you, but it's like, man, this is sort of a better version of all of those things.
2:14:00Yeah. I think where it gets to eventually, even in the glasses form, which I believe that the glasses
2:14:07form is still an intermediary step to its final, to the end game. Let's say it does get miniaturized
2:14:13into glasses that you can put on and take off. It will be a communal product where we can both
2:14:18experience the same digital reality. But past that, I think it's jacking right into your
2:14:24central nervous system and making you see these pixels that are not physically in any form.
2:14:30I think lenses go away, screens go away. And what's interesting about the Vision Pro version one
2:14:37is to me, it's showing us an early version of that end game where pixels are just in our space.
2:14:44Digital stuff is just in our physical space. And that's the world that we're rushing to
2:14:49that's 20 years away. Yeah. We've been talking long enough that where we just,
2:14:54I wasn't quite sure what happened to me, but we must have crossed the sunset boundary here
2:14:59in Philadelphia because the moon went pitch black. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got an environment
2:15:05set on automatic. I've got my environment sent to automatically switch between light mode and
2:15:10dark mode, which when you're in an artificial outdoor environment, which I guess the moon
2:15:14qualifies as it means it gets dark. And yeah, this happened to me last night where my environment
2:15:20just shut off completely. And I'm not talking about nighttime. I'm talking about blackness.
2:15:25There was a void and I don't, it was a, it was a hardware hiccup. The hardware has only crashed on
2:15:30me once, but the software has crashed a few times. Yeah. Just like my windows were there and it was
2:15:36blackness behind and it was really unnerving. We still need the real world, man. Yeah. I don't
2:15:45know that I've ever had the hardware crash, but I've definitely had it. I don't know where to place
2:15:49the blame, but there was one time during the review process where I had to figure out how to
2:15:55restart it. And I guess the answer is, so you know about force quitting, right? Yeah. You hold down
2:15:59both buttons for four seconds and you get a force quit menu. Yep. That's just like the Mac version.
2:16:04It's really neat. Yeah. I mean, if, if you think force quitting is cool. I think it's cool. I think
2:16:09it's very useful. But if you just keep pressing them for like eight seconds or 10 seconds, it
2:16:16restarts the whole system. Yeah. You get this, don't you get a slider to like, yeah, to shut down.
2:16:21And if you keep pressing the two buttons though, it'll do it automatically even without the slider,
2:16:27like if it gets so locked up that it won't let you slide. Yeah. Right. But the, the way I restarted
2:16:32it during my review process, I didn't figure that out. I just pulled the power cable out.
2:16:36Yeah. But yeah. But the fact that some of the apps can be buggy and need to be forced quit to me,
2:16:45it's just part of honestly part of the fun. It's early game. Yeah. It's early days. It's and yeah,
2:16:51exactly. It's every time there's like a little hiccup like that, you just get to see a little
2:16:56glimpse of where it's going to be, where it's going to improve. Well, this was a wonderful
2:17:00conversation. What a great idea. This was wonderful for me. I was really looking forward to this.
2:17:04Like I said, in my text, I texted to you one of the, this, this time happens like what,
2:17:10once when a new platform is introduced once that redefines computing once every what decade and a
2:17:16decade and a half. And so this first, these first days of capturing this experience in a way that
2:17:23we might remember it in the future. Right. So special. I never want to forget this. Yeah.
2:17:30And I'd never, there's nobody I'd rather do that with than you, John. So thank you very much.
2:17:34Well, thank you very much, Adam. That was very nice. All right. I will also thank our two sponsors
2:17:38of the show, our good friends at Squarespace and Trade Coffee. You can build a website
2:17:43with one of them and you can fill yourself with caffeine from the other one. I'll let you figure
2:17:49out which sponsor was which. Thanks, Adam.